Shantaram: Reading My Way to Mumbai
Often misunderstood, Shantaram is much more than a novel
“So it begins, this story, like everything else — with a woman, and a city, and a little bit of luck.” After about a page of contextual prose, that line is the one that truly kicks off Shantaram and from which I knew I would be hooked as I sat on my lounge chair at the beach in Jamaica.
Shantaram had been fervently recommended — or rather, hyped — to me for years and, like with many nine-hundred-plus page novels, the prospect of delving into it was daunting. Having read Tolstoy’s loose baggy monsters, War and Peace, and Anna Karenina in consecutive years, I had now built up the confidence to tackle Gregory David Roberts’ epic. After having searched for the book for weeks in Copenhagen and coming up short, I was able to finally get my hands on a copy at London Heathrow — our last port of call before leaving for our honeymoon in South America and the Caribbean. For the first two and a half weeks of our trip, the novel simply added weight to my luggage as I was busy juggling Hanya Yanagihara’s follow-up novel To Paradise with Bruce Chatwin’s travelogue In Patagonia. It was only with three days left of our honeymoon that I finally got around to it and devoured three hundred pages in what seemed like a frantic fever dream. I took the book home and subconsciously slowed…
