Projects have been submitted, finals are finished and books from
the fall semester are closed. If you are
like me, you are looking forward to a relaxing break before the spring semester
begins. For me, relaxation means
escaping with a good book. I love
nothing more than losing myself in a good read – a book so compelling I lock
myself in my room to steal a few quiet minutes to read, I stay up until the wee-hours of the morning because I can’t put my book down, and I pass on watching a
movie because I simply have to find out what’s going to happen next in my
novel. Shantaram
by Gregory David Roberts is one of those
rare stories that captures the reader from the very first page (at least I was captured!). What
is even more amazing about this novel is that the characters and the plot are loosely
based on the author’s life.
I revealed that the first page of Shantaram had me hooked:
© 2003, by Gregory David Robert
IT TOOK ME a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realised, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, 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 in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it's all you've got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.
In my case, it's a long story, and a crowded one. I was a revolutionary who lost his ideals in heroin, a philosopher who lost his integrity in crime, and a poet who lost his soul in a maximum-security prison. When I escaped from that prison, over the front wall, between two gun-towers, I became my country's most wanted man. Luck ran with me and flew with me across the world to India, where I joined the Bombay mafia. I worked as a gunrunner, a smuggler, and a counterfeiter. I was chained on three continents, beaten, stabbed, and starved. I went to war. I ran into the enemy guns. And I survived, while other men around me died. They were better men than I am, most of them: bitter men whose lives were crunched up in mistakes, and thrown away by the wrong second of someone else's hate, or love, or indifference. And I buried them, too many of those men, and grieved their stories and their lives into my own.
But my story doesn't begin with them, or with the mafia; it goes back to that first day in Bombay. Fate put me in the game there. Luck dealt the cards that led me to Karla Saaranen. And I started to play it out, that hand, from the first moment I looked into her green eyes. So it begins, this story, like everything else — with a woman, and a city, and a little bit of luck.
So - are you hooked? Happy reading and happy holidays!
