Shantaram

Escrito por Gregory David Roberts

Narrado por Sergio Bustos de la Tijera

"Me tomó mucho tiempo y a la mayor parte del mundo aprender lo que sé sobre el amor y el destino y las decisiones que tomamos, pero el corazón de esto me llegó en un instante, mientras estaba encadenado a una pared y siendo torturado".


Así comienza esta épica e hipnotizante primera novela de Gregory David Roberts, ambientada en el inframundo de la bombay contemporánea. Shantaram es narrado por Lin, un convicto fugado con un pasaporte falso que huye de la prisión de máxima seguridad en Australia por las calles llenas de una ciudad donde puede desaparecer.


Acompañados por su guía y fiel amigo, Prabaker,los dos entran en la sociedad oculta de mendigas y gángsters de Bombay, prostitutas y hombres santos, soldados y actores, e indios y exiliados de otros países, que buscan en este lugar notable lo que no pueden encontrar en otros lugares.


Como un hombre cazado sin hogar, familia o identidad, Lin busca amor y significado mientras dirige una clínica en uno de los barrios pobres de la ciudad, y sirve a su aprendizaje en las artes oscuras de la mafia de Bombay. La búsqueda lo lleva a la guerra, la tortura en prisión, el asesinato y una serie de traiciones enigmáticas y sangrientas. Las claves para desentrañar los misterios e intrigas que unen a Lin están en manos de dos personas. El primero es Khader Khan: padrino de la mafia, criminal-filósofo-santo, y mentor de Lin en el inframundo de la Ciudad Dorada. La segunda es Karla: escurridiza, peligrosa y hermosa, cuyas pasiones son impulsadas por secretos que la atormentan y sin embargo le dan un poder terrible.


Barrios marginales ardientes y hoteles de cinco estrellas, amor romántico y agonías carceleras, guerras criminales y películas de Bollywood, gurús espirituales y guerrilleros muyahidines--- esta gran novela tiene el mundo de la experiencia humana a su alcance, y un amor apasionado por la India en el corazón. Basado en la vida del autor, es en cualquier medida el debut de una voz extraordinaria en la literatura.

• Idioma: Español
• Editorial: BookaVivo
• Fecha de lanzamiento: 13 jul 2021
• ISBN: 9781638110743

Gregory David Roberts

Gregory David Roberts, the author of Shantaram and its sequel, The Mountain Shadow, was born in Melbourne, Australia. Sentenced to nineteen years in prison for a series of armed robberies, he escaped and spent ten of his fugitive years in Bombay—where he established a free medical clinic for slum-dwellers, and worked as a counterfeiter, smuggler, gunrunner, and street soldier for a branch of the Bombay mafia. Recaptured, he served out his sentence, and established a successful multimedia company upon his release. Roberts is a now full-time writer and lives in Bombay.

Comentarios para Shantaram

[mcbookletters · Calificación: 3 de 5 estrellas]

Not even half way through yet and I have to admit after reading other reviewer comments, I was less excited to finish the book (I know, shame on me). In my opinion though, so far I have found that while sometimes a little long winded, the story is intriguing and some quotes can be quite thought provoking. My favorite quote so far is, "Love is the opposite of power, that's why we fear it so much." So true! Can't wait to finish and update!

[clurb · Calificación: 5 de 5 estrellas]

It is almost impossible to believe that this epic adventure story happened in real life. Roberts' attempt to make a new life for himself in India involves living in slums, becoming involved with the local mafia, encountering bears and fighting in the Afganishtani wars. This is a tale of love, philosophy and self-discovery that never loses it's fast pace and action-packed plot. Excellent, absorbing stuff.

[li33ieg · Calificación: 2 de 5 estrellas]

I bought this to read on a trip and never got around to to finishing it for some reason. Perhaps it was envy (the hero gets to spend loads of time in India, which is something I'd like to do myself) or perhaps it's just that 900 pages appeared to me too long? Either way, it failed to capture my attention in quite the way almost every other story I've ever read that's set in India has.

[alexandriaginni · Calificación: 3 de 5 estrellas]

After the 1st 400 pages, it was hard to sustain interest, and I speed read the remainder. Protagonist lived lots of different days, but essentially faced variations of the same stuff over and over. The main storyline could have been more effectively told in less than half the 944 pages.

[samchan_1 · Calificación: 3 de 5 estrellas]

Most of the book was excellent, but what prevents it from getting four stars from me were all the portions about the existential questions, the narrator's fixation with Carla, and foray into Afghanistan. Otherwise, Roberts painted such a vivid picture of the slums and jails of Bombay.

[capnrandm · Calificación: 5 de 5 estrellas]

Possibly the only book that won me over through the author bio alone, the fact and fiction of this book was so utterly enthralling I soon lost any interest in separating those two threads. Poetic, romantic, and with a well written arc that illudes most creative non-fiction, SHANTARAM is a book I think about often.

[canalrat · Calificación: 1 de 5 estrellas]

I couldn't finish it. Which is very very rare for me. I enjoyed about the first four hundred pages, although I found the protagonist a bit too good to be true. But somewhere about page 600 he rescues three people in as many pages, and after that it all got too unbelievable and I gave up on it - by which time he was heading to Afghanistan. I think it's probably three books pushed into one, and that only the first book is really thought out and well written.

[dgmlrhodes · Calificación: 5 de 5 estrellas]

It's hard to describe how I felt about this book. I loved it...and I hated it. It was beautifully written...and I hated the rambling style. The characters were deep and well developed...yet I didn't really like them. The story was riveting...but I didn't care for the story line. However, with all of that said, it was a deeply powerful book with so many passages that a literature reader will appreciate very much.

[nordie_2 · Calificación: 3 de 5 estrellas]

Still in 2 minds about this book. It's an epic story of an Australian who has escaped from a vicious Aussie jail, and ended up in India. Over the next decades he lives in a slum, becomes a middle ranking mafia man, junkie and ends up fighting in the mountains of Afghanistan. Meanwhile he meets many colourful characters, who teach him many things, some he doesnt learn that quickly.

As a fictional story this is a bit farfetched but interesting. However there is the nagging thought that this is supposed to be a true-ish story (about the author's own life). Whilst he/the story tries to come off as "deep" ultimately he comes off as very shallow. He develops unquestioning friendships (bordering on adoration) with people who ultimately betray him. He discards those good people in his life with apparent ease in order to move himself onwards within the mafia world (only to be betrayed by the people he worships and losing the good people around him).

[devilish2 · Calificación: 5 de 5 estrellas]

I took me a long time to read this book. Normally I'd devour something like this in a week or two. But it took me a month. There's a lot here.I came to it with relatively few preconceptions - just how I like to approach a book. I knew it was fiction, but it felt like an autobiography somehow, maybe the storytelling arc is different, or the events are less structured and more random, I don't know. I wish more fiction felt this realistic.I particularly like the range of characters and the deep connection you, as a reader, develop with them. I also loved being introduced to parts of Bombay that I'm unlikely to experience - the prisons and slums, both so eloquently portrayed, with an emphasis on the human dimension in each, one a thing of darkness the other of beauty.He writes really well and it's a well crafted story, deep with philosophical observations about life and people - the things that bind all of us wherever we are.

[cervenka_1 · Calificación: 5 de 5 estrellas]

this book sat unread for about six months because I found the number of pages too daunting. Once I started reading I could have read twice as many pages. The adventures of Shantarum, the insight into the places he went, and the relationships he formed with the people around him were fascinating.

[resi_1 · Calificación: 5 de 5 estrellas]

Brilliant book - he does know what he's talking about and it took me right back to my time in Bombay (now Mumbai).

[baswood · Calificación: 4 de 5 estrellas]

[Shantaram] like Bombay (Mumbai) and its author Gregory David Roberts is full of contradictions and at over 920 pages this block buster of a novel has a lot of contradictions. I found myself lost in admiration for the vivid descriptions of Bombay and then almost simultaneously offended by some bombastic language, the hero worship of the villains and the general machismo that surrounds this story. Shantaram apparently means "man of peace" an epithet attached to the hero of this story: Gregory David Roberts himself, but Roberts is all too anxious to get into a fight; anybody's fight, which makes me wonder if the title is deeply ironic or if Roberts just has no sense of humour. I think the latter.Any reader writing about this book must consider the author himself, because to all intents and purposes it is autobiographical. It is written in the first person and at the start of the second paragraph the introduction is made:"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." This is no shrinking violet and the derring-do gets more derring as the novel's action and adventure is ratcheted up to its climax, first in a gun running expedition to the mujahedeen in the Afghan war and then in a battle of the gang warlords back in Bombay. This all brings us back to Roberts, how much of this stuff actually happened and this is one of the books great contradictions. From the author's profile on the net it is clear that he did escape from a high maximum prison in Australia and sought to lose himself in Bombay, but on his own web page Roberts says that "All of the characters in the novel, Shantaram, are created. None of the characters bears even a remote resemblance to any real person I’ve ever known". One wonders why then that he chose to base his central character: Lin, on his own life experiences. It could be argued that Bombay is a city of contradictions, where the super rich live cheek by jowl with some of the poorest people on the planet, but I don't think this is key to the novel's themes or ideas. Roberts refers to Shantaram as his masterpiece and leaves us in no doubt that he sees his novel as dealing intelligently with themes of alienation, of exile and of love and their is certainly much talk of philosophy and/or sophistry from Lin, he even has a go at explaining the meaning of life. All of this tends to pad out the novel into some sort of catch all for the reader, but it fails to give it the weight that Roberts seems to want to achieve, because the adventure/crime thriller story keeps pushing the action beyond the realms of believability and taking it into block-buster movie mode.There are however, plenty of things to like in this novel; the descriptions of street life in Bombay, from a Western mans point of view are very realistic and thoroughly convincing. I could easily imagine myself back in Bombay peering over Robert's/Lin's shoulder as he made his way through the streets. He also captures the Indian city dwellers rational on the life that they lead, the almost desperate energy in trying to make something out of very little, the acceptance of the differences between them and others in their world, the sheer numbers of people pressing all around them that makes any sort of privacy alien to many of them, but above all the desire to be happy despite everything. I thought his description of the shanty town was also full of life and he captures particularly well the sights sounds and smells of a place that is totally unfamiliar to most of us. He does an excellent job of replicating the vocal intonations of the English speaking Indians, however he just about avoids being over sentimental about some of the people there. He also creates some fine characters living on the fringes of the underworld and although he has a tendency to romanticise some of the gangsters that we meet, he does a good job with them as well. The plot tends to creak a little in places, but this is almost inevitable in a book of this length, the action scenes are handled with plenty of verve and there are some surprises.Roberts has provided such an excellent back drop for his novel that the reader is swept along in this exciting and sometimes exhilarating world and whenever I found myself not being able to swallow some of the plots mechanics or the actions of the characters there was always this wonderful background material to fall back on. I didn't like some of the philosophising as it felt a little false in places, but it rarely interrupted the flow of the story for too long and it was never so esoteric that it could not be followed. I thought that his language was at it's most bombast when he was expressing feelings of love and although his sex scenes avoided any elements of soft porn, they were pretty unconvincing. His descriptions of violence tended towards the gratuitous for me, but would probably be acceptable to most movie goers. What I really did not like was the character of Lin/Roberts; far too full of himself, far too machismo and yes far too uncomplicated, far too much of a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.This novel tries to be "all things to all men" and for some readers it might succeed, but it is no literary masterpiece. it is a good action adventure story with some excellent background material written by a man who has lived the life of a slum dweller and who has gotten involved in the Bombay underworld. The real India (from a Western mans perspective) seethes and gurgles throughout this book and is utterly convincing, however it is at times overly sentimental and the depth of feeling and thoughts expressed are for me a little too simplistic. Oh! and it's far too long. I rate this at 3.5 stars.

[pageturnerparsons · Calificación: 5 de 5 estrellas]

This is an epic story that will keep you turning the pages. I could not put it down and I rate this the best book I have ever read! If you don't read this, you will have missed out on an imense story that twists and turns from the first page to the last.Utterly brilliant

[charlie68_1 · Calificación: 4 de 5 estrellas]

A book about a man who falls in love with a city, Bombay. The story takes the reader from the slums, to an Indian prison, to the luxury of a gangster's life and even to wilds of Afghanistan. While you may not always like the main character and why he does things he's a entertaining companion. The story must be semi-autobiographical reading the blurb about the author's history and as such the ending is disappointing. Maybe there's a second book. A fascinating story though really capturing the ethos of Indian as well as Mumbai culture.

[smknuth1 · Calificación: 5 de 5 estrellas]

Based on the author's life, this novel is difficult to stop thinking about and more difficult to put down. Roberts writing is sincere, intense, and profound, even when the painful events are revealed matter-of-factly. The story is interesting and entertaining, providing many life lessons during the journey. It's sad when it ends because the characters seem as though they should live on beyond the 1,000 pages.

[stevenjohntait · Calificación: 3 de 5 estrellas]

Although I struggled to like the main protagonist for a start, who seemed to love himself and tried justify his past errors in life, I ploughed on and enjoyed the book. Big epic cross-continent story, that I can't be assed to write about because I'm sure it's already been adequately done by other people on here.

[sharonlflynn_1 · Calificación: 2 de 5 estrellas]

I had heard a lot about this book before I started reading it. I was told that I'd love it. I hated it. I could not wait to finish it. The whole story (despite being supposedly true) is completely unbelievable. I could not understand the motivations of the main character, why he got caught up in the things he did. I can't figure out if he was just stupid or foolhardy, but by midway through the book I didn't care what happened to him.

[parthbakshi_1 · Calificación: 5 de 5 estrellas]

I Just Finished Reading Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts and found it to be one of the best pseudo-fiction( a cross between fiction and non-fiction ,a word penned by me) novel, i have read in a long long time ... The way the author has introduced some of the characters has completely bowled me over ...esp Karla and Modena and the way the author has described some of the scenes especially when lisa betrays Modena and when khader khan is killed in the mountains of the war ravaged Afghanistan made me feel guilty in a way as if i was the person who had actually carried out the act.The story is quite fast paced and you dont feel bored considering the size of the book which is quite huge considering the 900 odd pages in it.But at few places it does seem to drag especially when lindsay or Lin goes to jail in India .Hope that Mira nair does justice to that scene ,Infact the author himself is the scriptwriter for the movie,In an interview he said that the book is an excellent script for a movie because he visualized it as if he was writing it for a movie ,no wonder when you are reading it you do feel you are a kind of third person watching the whole thing from above the way you have spectator camera in doom or Counter strike.The author has done an amazing introspection on life and has written a number of pearls of wisdom to say that one can easily relate to."Every human heartbeat, he’d said many times, is a universe of possibilities. And it seemed to me that I finally understood exactly what he’d meant. He’d been trying to tell me that every human will has the power to transform its fate. I’d always thought that fate was something unchangeable: fixed for every one of us at birth, and as constant as the circuit of stars. But I suddenly realized that life is stranger and more beautiful than that. The truth is that no matter what kind of game you find yourself in, no matter now good or bad the luck, you can change your life completely with a single thought or a single act of love "."when we fall in love with someone our greatest fear is that they wont love us back,what we should fear instead is that we wont stop loving them.. ““Some feelings sink so deep into the heartthat only loneliness can help u find them again.”“sometimes we love with nothing more than hope.Sometimes we cry with everything except tears”"Happiness is a myth, which was invented to make us buy things".Some of the characters i felt were quite unnecessary esp Johhny cigar (others may disagree with it but i felt it was unnecessary).Without going much deeper into the story line i would say whoever has read Maximum city by Suketu Mehta wil love this book.....I hope Mira Nair does Justice to the book ,and hope Big B can live upto his character in the movie.

[eye_gee-1 · Calificación: 5 de 5 estrellas]

This autobiographical novel was the best thing I've read in ages. Beautiful prose, wonderful setting (Bombay), vivid characters, often hilarious dialogue. All this along with a thoughtful and introspective writer who's lived a life that could easily be turned into an action movie.

[starsa_2 · Calificación: 5 de 5 estrellas]

Well worth the read. Excellent.

[tahoegirl · Calificación: 5 de 5 estrellas]

I loved this book! There are too many good things to say about it I could go on forever. One of my top ten favorites

[flexatone_1 · Calificación: 3 de 5 estrellas]

Roberts won me over, and despite a few rolls of my eyes from time to time, was compelled to finish this 900+ page autobiographical novel. I enjoyed the wild, wild stories he tells, however ham-fisted their telling may be. The first 150 pages form an ebullient and exciting description of Bombay and his enjoyable bewilderment during his arrival there. That said, Roberts is certainly not the best writer in the world. When he is moving toward a bit of philosophy, he tends to take a heavy-handed on-the-nose approach, and the sprawling book is full of conversations and narrative whose deletion would have actually enhanced the storytelling. At its best, Roberts describes India itself in a wonderful and inspiring way, and he had me wondering how he would get out of each jam he found himself in. But at its worst, it's an unfiltered diary of naive, vaguely philosophical conversations and pointless narrative.

[amyfaerie · Calificación: 4 de 5 estrellas]

Really intriguing story set in India. I read it while IN India last summer.

[gcg1234 · Calificación: 5 de 5 estrellas]

This is an absolute must read book for anyone who has the stomach to handle it. Anyone who watched slumdog millionaire and felt that you could not really taste, hear, smell and feel India in it ... and it was too much for the cinema audience. This is far more gritty. I have yet to meet someone who has read this and not loved it. I could not put it down

[johnjack_1 · Calificación: 4 de 5 estrellas]

A very good read but a little too long, Daily Telegraph called it a literary masterpiece, I would not go that far, but it is worth reading and learning about the raw side of reality in Bombay,the author has a gift for causing the feeling and mood to get to the reader.

[karensaville · Calificación: 4 de 5 estrellas]

An Australian escaped convict arrives in Bombay looking to start a new life and disappear. This is an epic adventure story of his life covering a 10 year period in which he lives in an Indian rural community, then a Bombay slum becoming their resident 'doctor', a stint in Bollywood films, fighting in Afghanistan and a hellish time in an Idina prison. There is also a love theme running through the book. It was fast paced and a good insight into life in the slums in particular. There was a fair bit of philosophising which I enjoyed in the most part but found some of it a bit too much. I enjoyed all of the book until the Afghanistan bit - I never did understand why he went there. Overall a really enjoyable book and one that stayed with me for a long time.

[elizajanecurtis · Calificación: 3 de 5 estrellas]

This was an engaging story but the narration was often just really annoying. It took me a while to get through it because I had to take breaks to get away from the annoying protagonist. It had a wonderful sense of place and lots of interesting storylines, but the whole premise of a white man finding redemption and finding his true self through losing himself in a bewildering exotic wonderland... felt like kind of a tired cliche. And the love story with Carla, I don't even know, it was just super corny and tiring. But I stuck it out through this whole long book because there were enough interesting and exciting parts to make up for the problematic narration.

[phenske · Calificación: 5 de 5 estrellas]

Brilliant, amazing, spectacular. Took me away to another place.

[namaste374 · Calificación: 4 de 5 estrellas]

A very enjoyable read about the Mafia in Bombay. Sections of society and the black undercurrents I had not even suspected of existing were well described and the chracterisation of the main people is brilliant - I'd love to have met Prabecker. An enjoyable read, despite being 900 pages long.