Shantaram

Mostar, 25 October 2012

When I left home I was reading the book Shantaram, which - despite its weight - I took with me during the travel. The book is about the Australian author's ups and downs of his experience in India.

In short, Gregory David Roberts was a scholar at an Australian university when personal problems led him to become a heroin addict and a robber. Consequently, he is caught by police and condemned to a ten-year jail sentence. He breaks out of prison, flees to India where he enters into the Indian culture and into a flow of extreme experiences. He lives in a slum in Bombay where he sets up a small clinic, joins the Bombay mafia and eventually fights with the mujaheddin against the Soviets. 

Throughout the story emerges a deep human experience told with an accurate and highly descriptive narrative style. The author is outstanding in the description of the different - and at times - contrasting facets of his emotions. He provides his deep understanding of truth, freedom, meaning and humanity.

The book is basically about love: fatherly love, fraternal love, passionate love, love for a friend and for a country. Above all, it is about love for life. This is a book to feel. Through the unfolding events I could feel a lot of insights that made me reflect. Sometimes I felt like reaching a deeper level of understanding by following his words and entering into his heart.

Nevertheless, there are a couple of remarks to be said. Firstly and obviously the book is too long: 936 pages densely written that took me five months to read. Sometimes I had the feeling that he reports episodes that could easily be omitted as not in line with the flow of main events.

My main critic is however on the nature of the book. The work is neither a true story, nor a novel. According to him, main events are true but some details are invented without specifying much about what is true and what is fictional. In fact, this opacity bewildered me. 

A good book needs trust between the writer and the readers. Trust - as in human relations - needs clarity. Either you write a novel or a true story and you are clear about it. In fact, this is vaguely stated but not clear enough and the main information on this matter I had to find on the Internet.

Notwithstanding these remarks, his first-rate narrative style makes it a must for wannabe-writers and I believe that Shantaram is one of the best and most insightful book that I have ever read.

The following is one of the passage I enjoyed mostly:

"I think I'd expected to feel ... nourished, perhaps, and vindicated, by forcing her to tell me what she'd done and why she'd done it. I think I'd hoped to be released by it, and solaced, just by hearing her tell me. But it wasn't like that. I felt empty: the kind of emptiness that's sad but not distressed, pitying but not broken-hearted, and damaged, somehow, but clearer and cleaner for it. 

And then I knew what it was, that emptiness: there is a name for it, a word we use often, without realising the universe of peace that's enfolded in it. The word is free."