Shantaram

I posted a review of two books I read earlier this summer on July 16, and the response was so underwhelming, that I thought I would post another. As loyal readers may recall when I wrote that review, I said that a friend had lent me a novel of almost 1,000 pages, and that the review would be posted long about November. So what am I doing here, on August 8, a mere three weeks later?

As it turned out, the book, Shantaram, By Gregory David Roberts, was only 933 pages long. Yet they were about the best 933 pages I’ve read in any novel for at least the past ten years. Every now and then in life, the perfect book comes along at the perfect time, and this was one of those cases. Shantaram was only recently released, and supposedly a movie of the same name is coming out next year. Much to my chagrin, Johnny Depp is slated to play the main character. As you might imagine, we are not big Johnny Depp fans, notwithstanding his half-decent Keith Richards impersonation.

Anyway, I don’t want to give much of the story line away. Basically, Shantaram is a semi-autobiographical account of a man who escaped from a maximum security prison in Australia, fled to Bombay in the early 1980s, and created a new life for himself working for the Bombay mafia as a counterfeiter and black market currency trader, living in the slums, operating a free clinic for the people who lived in the the slum, and fighting the Russians in Afganistan. As action-packed as all this sounds, and it is as action-packed as they get, the book has much more to do with the our purpose in life, the meanings of love, hate and forgiveness, and how people struggle with and overcome the very difficult challenges that we all inevitably face from time to time. It demands a fair amount of deep introspection and reflection – between detailed accounts of knife fights and all manner of intrigue.

The book was recommended by PH, and he’s never steered my wrong on a book before, nor I him, and I won’t steer you wrong either.

The next posting will deal with more mundane topicality. I still have that big backlog from June to deal with. It’s been a busy, busy summer. But some free time is coming up over the next three weekends, so expect lots of new stuff and a new name for the blog as well. We are still evaluating ideas, so keep those cards and letters coming.