This fucking book.

A block of more than a thousand pages.

I didn’t know it.
I didn’t know anything about David Gregory Roberts.
I had never read an Australian writer before.
Two books don’t exactly make a career. A fugitive, yes; writer, we can debate that later.

Shantaram is the story of a criminal who escapes from an Australian prison and ends up in India.
He is quickly pulled into a life made of slums, compromises, crime, and dangerous relationships, where survival means choosing every single day where you stand.

Usually, I talk about books once I’ve finished them.
It’s how I let them go.
A way to empty myself before moving on, so I don’t compare, so I don’t build expectations.

This one didn’t wait.

I’m not even halfway through. I’m around page 300.
And I want, and I need, to talk about it.

WHY SHANTARAM

I bought Shantaram because of the author’s life.

The fact that Roberts was a fugitive mattered.

Before opening it, what would this book have been otherwise? Another story about someone travelling through India and telling us about it? How original.

And why this one, then, and not A Fortune-Teller Told Me by Tiziano Terzani?

Now that I have it in my hands, I’m glad I chose it.
That title had crossed my path too many times for it to be accidental.

Because on page one, yes, on PAGE ONE, he writes this:

“To understand the essential, all it took was an instant, while I was being tortured, chained to a wall.

Through the silent screams tearing through my mind, I realised that despite the shackles and the destruction of my body, I was still free.

Free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them.

It doesn’t sound like much, I know. But when you have nothing else — bound by a chain biting into your flesh — a freedom like that represents an infinite universe of possibilities.

And the choice you make, hatred or forgiveness, can become the story of your life.”

I mean.
If this isn’t enough to make you want to talk about what you’re reading, I don’t know what is.

After that page I was already in, because it reads like a chronicle — without the boredom of a chronicle.
He makes metaphors that are simple and impossible to forget.
Eyes compared to precise shades of desert dunes.
Faces shaped by the compromises people have made in life.

You get the feeling these aren’t ideas someone invents.
They’re things someone notices after living.

Reading Shantaram, I feel like the author wanted to share everything.
Like publishing this book was a necessity. Like not publishing it would have been another crime.

300 pages of shantaram

A lot has already happened.

The escape. I don’t remember the last time I devoured pages the way I devoured those. Pure tension. Anxiety. Hunger.
I was reading on the bus and wanted to get off one stop earlier just to have an excuse to stop reading.

I kept reminding myself that I already knew how it would end. Obviously the escape worked — otherwise the chapter wouldn’t exist.

Then there are the slums.

I knew they existed, in theory. From documentaries, from the internet.
I didn’t know they had a name. I didn’t know how permanent they were. I didn’t know how they functioned.

They describe a form of life that, from the outside, is incomprehensible, until the author takes you inside. And he can do that because he comes from a life close enough to mine before everything broke.

Then there’s the Madam.
A woman who controls the most desirable foreign prostitutes in Bombay.

Add the mafia figures, the accidents, the violence, the friendships, the loyalties.
All of this is already there.

And I’m still far from the middle.

At this point in the book, before going any further, I stop and notice what’s happening to me.

I feel the way I do when I order a cocktail at the bar and turns out to be unexpectedly good. I find myself staring at the menu, wondering whether to order another or leave it there, untouched, so I don’t ruin it.

I feel the way I do when the first time having sex with someone goes surprisingly well and you don’t know whether it was the alcohol or a real connection, and you hesitate: do you do it again, or do you let the first time stay perfect and walk away?

I know this book will live up to its promise all the way to the end.
But for now, right here, it’s one of the most beautiful things that has landed in my hands in the last few months.

Chapeau.