“The choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.”.I’ll share with you here some passages of this unique novel, to give you some of its flavor: It was surprising to me, how philosophical the gangsters were, and I enjoyed those passages very much. Therefore these goondas stuck to money laundering, counterfeiting, forgery, and supporting righteous freedom fighters with guns and ammunition. For example, this group stayed away from prostitution, pornography, and selling drugs, which you could make a lot of money from, but they avoided them because they corrupted people’s souls, and hurt them. However, the gangsters were faithful to their moral code, and honorable in their own way. To me, the wrong thing is just the wrong thing. He accepts that, “Sometimes you must do the wrong thing for the right reasons,” and I do not agree. This book is a window into a world that is so very much unlike my own. We all should be as self-assured, resilient, and mindful of our surroundings. The author/main character is observant and cogent, with a vast vocabulary greater than mine, and a fairly high opinion of himself, especially given all his bad choices. The writing here is detailed, lush, and sometimes overwrought. Additionally, themes within this story focus on forgiveness, choosing love over hate, and that your fate is not fixed, but instead is determined by what you do. It is also about falling in love with a place, and the lengths one will go to for a sense of belonging. It is a book by a criminal, about crime, and by a heroin user, who has suffered its cost. Shantaram is kind of like a 1980’s version of a Charles Dickens novel set instead in India, with an extra dash of ego and hubris, and more violence and drugs. The author’s bio says he was apprehended after 10 years in exile, and served the balance of his sentence, during which time he wrote this book.

This is basically an auto-biography of a convict who escaped from a maximum security prison in Australia, and who arrived as a fugitive in Bombay, where he became a medic in a slum, a smuggler, a counterfeiter for the mafia, a prisoner in another miserable jail, and even a gun-runner in the remote mountains of Afghanistan, where he ran into enemy guns and survived, while others around him died. I am glad to have read it, but even more glad to finally be done with it. At 933 pages of dense text and small print, this book is long.

Shantaram novel