Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts

Wow.  This was an epic book - hundreds of pages and a remarkable story.  Both Julie on my block and Christian from my book club recommended it to me the same week so I treated myself to it in paperback as a reward for getting a new job (yay me!).  People stopped me on the street to comment on how much they liked it - one gal at Starbucks even said that she was embarrassed to admit that she didn't read anything for a year after this book because nothing could stand up to it.  With all that leading up to it I had high expectations.

Huh.

I can't say I loved it - although I did finish it.  The author is a man who escaped from a New Zealand jail and lived in the underworld in Bombay...and the book is about a man who escaped from a New Zealand jail and lived in the underworld in Bombay.  But he claims that it is fiction so I tried to read it like that.  The book spans many locales - most memorably the slums of Bombay, the Afghanistan countryside, and Bombay jails, all described in extreme detail.  There are many well-developed characters that the narrator depicts also in great detail.  The story doesn't really follow a linear path, and I didn't find the ending to be comprehensive.  But the main character does grow and change, and it was fun reading about his extraordinary experiences.

I guess what I disliked about the book was the author's tone.  In some places, the writing was extraordinarily good: poetic and descriptive.  And there were a few sections where he captured an emotion or thought that I found incredibly beautiful or unusual.  I think that is why other people loved the book so much, because they found the majority of the book that way.  But most of the time I found the narrator to be naive - and unrealistic - and also too willing to see something special in someone that was not expressed to the reader enough.  He seemed to be going through these experiences in a Zen-like trance with pithy observations.

I was disappointed - given the glimpses of "special" that I got in a couple of the passages, I wish that could have been the entire experience I had reading this book.