Shantaram - Gregory David Roberts

[goodreads]

Title: Shantaram
Author: Gregory David Roberts
Genre: Cultural
Rating: 3/5
# pages: 944
Date read: December, 2011

Lin, an escaped convict with a false passport flees maximum security prison in Australia for the teeming streets of a city where he can disappear.

Accompanied by his guide and faithful friend, Prabaker, the two enter Bombay's hidden society of beggars and gangsters, prostitutes and holy men, soldiers and actors, and Indians and exiles from other countries, who seek in this remarkable place what they cannot find elsewhere.

Wow... took me almost two months to read this book! It wasn't a bad or boring book, but it just wasn't a page-turner either, and for a book of 900+ pages, that's really to its own detriment.

I can't really figure out whether it's a novel or a memoir. From what I've been able to gather through online articles, it seems to be a fictionalized memoir... or a novel based on the author's own experiences. At least, all the larger details of Lin's life were things that happened to the author as well.

It was really, really interesting. I know next to nothing about India of the 1980s and was fascinated (and occasionally horrified) by the descriptions given. But holy foreshadowing, Batman! It's a literary technique that has always bothered me, and even more so when as in this book it occurs in almost every chapter.

I'm glad to have read it, and ended up loving some of the characters like Prabaker and (strangely enough) Karla, but I really, really doubt it's a book I'm ever going to read again.