Shantaram: the most amazing novel I'd read in ages

[dangermousie]

linaerys, I am totally in your debt. If it wasn't for your posting about it, I would have never decided to check out Gregory David Roberts' Shantaram and it's brilliant, easily the best book I've read in ages.

How could I not love a book with this opening line:

"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."

Whoa. It was love from that point on.

But even if it wasn't, this description (on page 25) would have done me in:

"I looked at her, a stranger, and every other breath strained to force its way from my chest. a clamp like a tightening fist seized my heart. A voice in my blood said yes, yes, yes ... the ancient Sanskrit legends speak of a destined love, a karmic connection between souls that are fated to meet and collide and enrapture one another. The legends say that the loved one is instantly recognized because she's loved in every gesture, every expression of thought, every movement, every sound, and every mood that prays in her eyes. The legends say that we know her by her wings - the wings that only we can see - and because wanting her kills every other desire of love.

The same legends also carry warnings that such fated love may, sometimes, be the possession and the obsession of one, and only one, of the two souls twinned by destiny. But wisdom, in one sense, is the opposite of love. Love survives in us precisely because it isn't wise."