"A literary masterpiece…it has the grit and pace of a thriller", Daily Telegraph
The bestselling book, Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts, have received massive praise from the international press. Sunday Times calls it a "Publishing phenomenon", Daily Mail exclaims it to be an "extraordinary vivid …. a gigantic, jaw-dropping, grittily authentic saga"
Gregory David Roberts; Australia’s Most Wanted Man, a Slum Doctor, Bollywood Actor and Street Soldier for the Bombay Mafia
Gregory David Roberts was born in June 1952 in Melbourne, Australia. In 1976 his marriage broke up and he lost his daughter in custody dispute. He turned to drugs and became a heroin addict. To support his heroin habit he robbed banks with a toy pistol and was captured and imprisonment in 1978. After two years in prison, he escaped from a Maximum Security Pentridge Prison together with a fellow prisoner by more or less just climbing over the prison wall, between two watch towers, on the middle of the day. After hiding out in Australia and fleeing to New Zealand he ended up in Bombay. The story told in the book, Shantaram, begins and ends here in Bombay, the city he learns to love, where he to works as a slum doctor, a Bollywood actor and as a street soldier for the Bombay mafia.
Characters in Shantaram
The book is thrilling and vivid, and the story told is much more absurd than most fiction stories. The 933 pages never get boring, and the reader is introduced to a variety of characters and their destinies. Parbaker, a slum dweller and tourist guide, shows Gregory, or Lin which he is nicknamed by Parbaker, around in the city and even invites him home to his village. Lin stays in the village for six months and learns how to speak Marathi. The portrait of Parbaker would be enough to recommend the book; the smiling, earnest and eager to help “very excellent first number Bombay guide”, as he calls himself, makes the reader laugh and cry. The conversations in the book, with Parbaker and others are sometimes hysterical. Gregory has kept the slang and language of his friends and it makes the conversations authentic.
Some of the other characters in the Shantaram:
- Vikram, the want to be cowboy who is deeply ion love with Lettie
- Kano, the bear, and his two blue bear handlers who get thrown into jail, twice, and are later dressed up as the God Ganesh and smuggled out of Bombay
- Didier, a whisky drinking fellow that stands behind his friends no matter what it brings him into
- Khader Khan, the mafia’s don, a manipulating, but caring father figure
- Abdullah, the young, strong and wild gangster with the great look
- Madame Zhou, the evil brothel mama
Love, Loss, Fear, Forgiveness and Friendship
Gregory is a man full of emotions and since the book in is written in retrospect he has had time to analyze all his feelings thoroughly, everything from his love to the beautiful, but cynical Karla, to the nagging fear of being imprisoned and the loss of his friends and family in Australia. He is eager to explain and understand his own feelings, but not so much his actions. He is more “go with the flow” and thereby ends up as everything from slum doctor, bollywood actor, street soldier for the Bombay mafia to mujahedeen fighter in Afghanistan (for en introduction to the war in Afghanistan, read the book review of Ghost Wars by Steve Coll).
The book, Shantaram, begins and ends in Bombay, but Gregory David Roberts was eventually captured in Frankfurt in 1990 and finished serving his sentence in Germany and Australia. He wrote the Shantaram novel three times since the two first versions were trashed by prison guards. Australian edition of the novel was published in August 2003 and he sold the movie rights to Johnny Depp, Brad Grey, Graham King, Warner Brothers in October 2004, and even better; a sequel of the novel to Shantaram has been promised!
From the book cover: [Shantaram is] "A novel of high adventure, great story telling and moral purpose, based on an extraordinary true story of eight years in the Bombay underworld"Shantaram was first published in Australia and in New Zealandin 2003 by Scribe Publications. First published in Great Britain in 2004 by Little, Brown. Paperback edition published in 2005 by Abacus. ISBN: 978-0-349-1175-6
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Birgit Ryningen - Birgit (born 01.11.77) is a judo player with one Nordic and several Norwegian Champion titles. She holds a PhD in material science and ...
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