I read this about a year ago. I'm glad I read it. I sort of liked it. I can see why lots of people like it. I'm not being very articulate, I know.
The thing is, whilst I enjoyed the story (except for the Afghanistan stuff which I found really tedious) I found myself becoming more and more annoyed with the author who seemed a little too in love with himself. I wanted to bop him on his big preachy nose.
A few times I've wanted to buy a copy for a friend, but something stops me from doing so. It's not just the fact that my only friend is a dog. No. Aside from that, I think I'd be slightly embarrassed to; incase they thought I was unaware of the self indulgent over-dramatized nature of it and I'd want to say "oh, uh, yeah, I thought he was a twit too. Honest".
He (Gregory David Roberts) paints himself as a tortured hero that the reader is supposed to be so in awe of, but I think he comes off as a glorified, pretentious thug. I didn't like him.
Anyway, I found this review on Amazon a few months ago and it made me laugh so hard I had tears rolling down my cheeks. Then again, my friend's a Spaniel so I'm easily impressed. In fact, I should have just pasted this in to begin with:
R. Gray (Edinburgh)
The cover blurb looked interesting. The opening pages, describing the author's arrival in Bombay, were good. I'm going to enjoy this, I thought.
How wrong can you be.
This is an awful book. Awful.
My top four moans are:
- The way ALL the characters constantly speak in sub-Wildean aphorisms. Ever heard of tone of voice?
- The constant and cringeworthy GCSE-grade philosophy that we're meant to think is profound.
- The embarassingly florid prose that litters every page, and especially any passages involving Karla.
- The author's relentlessly inflated opinion of himself. Every other page we're meant to be in awe of the fact he learnt some of the local languages, and is therefore the most amazing Westerner to have ever visited India. Ever. (And every Indian thinks so too, of course.) As another reviewer said wearily: Everybody loves Lin. Simple villagers love him, slum dwellers love him, beautiful ex-prostitutes love him, gangsters love him, Afghani drug lords love him, taxi drivers always love him at a glance and so on and so forth. As a character, he's just unbelievable. And that's without getting into the fact he's absolutely The Best at Everything - from fighting to lovemaking, medicine to philosophy.
It soon became apparent that this book is shamelessly aimed at a certain kind of buyer: the upper middle class 18 year old on their 'gap' year, who thinks that smoking a few joints in Goa qualifies as discovering the real India and you just have to read this book man, it's like the real India and like sooo deep and profound and if like everyone read it the world's problems would be solved dude...
I invite all future reviewers to start contributing their own Shataram efforts. To get the ball rolling, here's mine...
"That's not a review of the book, it's a book of the review," stated Karla, as the stars of Bombay's glittering sky danced in her eyes like a thousand diamonds.
"You're just trying to be clever," drawled Didier, waving the Caf