Shantaram (Gregory David Roberts, 2003)
It's rare that I come across a modern true story that I'm blown away by. Often times I find them to be sensationalized and drawn out, often times reeking more of fiction than of fact.
Shantaram exceeded any and all expectations I might have had about these kinds of novels.
This book was the product of a determined man. Gregory David Roberts was in prison when he wrote it and watched as his first two drafts, amounting to 600 pages and six years worth of work, got destroyed by prison officials. Many pages of the original handwritten manuscript are stained with blood, the result of residual physical damage stemming frostbite he'd suffered while fighting in Afghanistan. It's obvious throughout the book that it was written as a testament to the struggle he endured and that its completion meant the closure of a very painful yet enlightening period of his life.
The book is 900+ pages and I read it in just two weeks. It's undoubtedly one of the most powerful books I've ever read and is a breathtaking account of one man struggling to come to terms with himself - his past and his personal quest for freedom.
Shantaram was recommended to me by a number of friends, mostly as a great book to read before I head off on my journey through India in a few weeks. I fully expected to carry it there with me, since a nearly 1000 page book did not seem like a realistic endeavor in just a month. I'd known nothing about the book, and nothing could've prepared me for the adventure I would embark on as I read the story of a convict who escaped from prison and found himself in India.
The story starts off with Roberts landing in Bombay just a short time after he'd escaped a maximum security prison in Australia where he was serving a 20 year sentence for armed robbery. Though seemingly cliché, it's not the story of an uneducated man who had nothing to lose by robbing at gunpoint, but rather a story of a highly-educated individual who'd lost everything he'd known and loved and further descended into a world of drugs and desperation before being arrested.
But that's not what the book is about. As Roberts lands in Bombay, we experience what we can call his rebirth. Landing with nothing more than his false passport and enough money to last him some time in India, he almost immediately befriends a small Indian man who would be his guide in Bombay. Prabaker would teach him the simplicity of being a good man and would show him the heart and love that would help to begin his ascent from the bottom.
From here we watch as Roberts immerses himself in the spirituality of Indian culture and customs, learns Hindi and Marathi, is forced to live in the Bombay slums after he loses everything he has, rises from the ashes to create a makeshift health clinic in those slums, befriends Indian mafia dons who take him in as a son, fights among his brothers in Afghanistan, receives the unrequited love of the Indian people, and wholeheartedly gives it in return. In that love he redeems himself a million times over and finds his own path to enlightenment.
Shantaram is a book magnificent in its scale, achieving a level of spirituality through amazing prose and powerful introspection. It never once feels pretentious or disingenuous, but rather feels so painfully and emotionally real that you empathize with his struggle as a reemerging spirit and as a flesh-and-blood human being. His writing is beautiful and the simplicity of his views and the views of others on life and death, joy and pain, enlightenment and struggle are so eloquently portrayed, you never want to put the book down.
Needless to say, its helped me to further anticipate my trip to India, not only as an adventure, but as a very personal, spiritual journey where perhaps I can learn just a little bit more about myself. Furthermore, the way he describes India in all its beauty, its energy, and the love-filled livelihood of its one billion plus inhabitants is enough to get me all anxious and ready to go.
I urge you to read this book. I can promise you, even as the cynic that I can often be, that you will not be disappointed.
PS - Once you're finished (or if you need further convincing) check out the videos of his talks on YouTube. Truly fascinating.
Growth of the Soil (Knut Hamsun, 1917)
For me, reading is an unhealthy obsession. I've read close to 20 books so far this year and I may finish with close to 30. I'm so addicted, that I even began setting literary goals for myself, thus categorizing me as a huge nerd.
For example, one of my missions is to read every single thing John Steinbeck has ever written (I'm close to ten so far, I think).
One of my other nerdy goals is to read one work by every literature Nobel Prize winner ever. I'm doing pretty well, having read books by about 15 different winners and being disappointed only once. These Swedes really know their great literature.
It can be a great thrill to find a fantastic book by an author who has fallen somewhat into obscurity throughout the world. Ask any Norwegian or Swede who Knut Hamsun is, and without a doubt they'll know. But I can't say I have many friends outside of Scandinavia, if any, who would know who he is. Knut Hamsun (you do pronounce the 'k') won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1920.
I was lucky enough to have my Norwegian friend Aleks recommend Hamsun's Growth of the Soil to me. Wanting to achieve my literature goal and at the same time get more into Scandinavian writing, Hamsun appeared to me to be perfect choice.
But the fact is, Norwegian sentiment towards Hamsun is confused. Hamsun was an outspoken Nazi sympathizer. Actually, he was a "vehement advocate" of Nazi Germany, having mailed his Nobel medal to Joseph Goebbels in 1943 and later having visited Hitler, and furthermore having eulogized him after his death as "a warrior, a warrior for mankind, and a prophet of the gospel of justice for all nations." (Source: Wikipedia)
So whereas Norwegians are very proud of Hamsun's accomplishments as an author, they have a much tougher time coming to terms with his very radical political ideology during one of Europe's darkest periods.
Needless to say, this would never stop me from reading a great book.
Following WWI, the West was going through a period of rapid industrialization and economic development. The middle class was seeing their hard work get swallowed up by a speculative and increasingly credit-laden, power-hungry upper class further empowered by laissez-faire economics. The gap between the rich and poor was widening and the mass was getting restless and desperate. Sounds familiar.
Growth of the Soil was simple in words and profound in scope. It was both foretelling and a scathing commentary on the state of the world at the time. It starts off telling the story of a simple man Isak walking through the Norwegian wilderness near the Swedish border looking for a place to settle and begin a life for himself. He picks a spot and begins to survive off the fruit of his labor. His hard work is dignified (and his only means of survival), his intentions are pure, and his simple modesty is his greatest trait. And thus is his success imminent.
However, as to be expected, the chaos of the self-righteous man intrudes, always seeking the easy way out, and looking to capitalize off the hard work of others. The book follows Isak and his family as they persist in the wild, fending off the educated industrialist, favoring hard work and personal dignity over easily sought out wealth (and more often as Hamsun explains, debt). It never proves easy, and not all of Isak's family is able to stay true to his ways, falling victim to the lure of high society, education, and industrialization. How does it end? Well I'll let you read it.
Hamsun is not all together off base with his belief that man is constantly trying to seek the quickest means to wealth. Rather, he preaches that man's greatest source of persistent wealth and personal sustainability is in his hard work and clarity of purpose.
This book blew me away. It's beautifully written and very direct in its message. His ideals at times seem very early-American/pro-libertarian and his complete loathing for bureaucratic, self-righteous, mooching, fast-tracking capitalists resonates with me. Don't get me wrong, Growth of the Soil is not anti-capitalist, but rather speaks out against those who seek to 'capitalize' purely off the hard work of others.
Really a fantastic read for anyone looking to pick up a good book by a good, though controversial writer.
PS - as a newly inducted Amazon affiliate, I get a cut if you buy it through the above link. 
I'm a capitalist pig, I know.
A fantastic moment (one of very many) from Women by Bukowski
"I'll bet you know a lot of women," said Hilda. "We've read your books."
"I write fiction."
"What's fiction?"
"Fiction is an improvement on life."
Five Writers I Profoundly Respect
Henry Miller
An epic passage from Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer
Brilliant writing. Maybe the most well-written book I've ever read. You can't make this shit up. This isn't even the most amazing passage in the book, it just happened to be the one I read when I had my laptop near me. This man is the greatest unknown American writer of the 20th century...
The girls have undressed and we are examining the floor to make sure that they won't get any splinters in their ass. They are still wearing their high-heeled shoes. But the ass! The ass is worn down, scraped, sandpapered, smooth, hard, bright as a billiard ball or the skull of a leper. On the wall is Mona's picture: she is facing northeast on a line with Cracow written in green ink. To the left of her is the Dordogne, encircled with a red pencil. Suddenly I see a dark, hairy crack in front of me, set in a bright, polished billiard ball; the legs are holding me like a pair of scissors. A glance at that dark, unstitched wound and a deep fissure in my brain opens up: all the images and memories that had been laboriously or absent-mindedly assorted, labeled, documented, filed, sealed, and stamped break forth pell mell like ants pouring forth out of a crack in the sidewalk; the world ceases to revolve, time stops, the very nexus of my dreams is broken and dissolved and my guts spill out in a grand schizophrenic rush, an evacuation that leaves me face to face with the Absolute. I see again the great sprawling mothers of Picasso, their breasts covered with spiders, their legend hidden deep in the labyrinth. And Molly Bloom lying on a dirty mattress for eternity. On the toilet door red chalk cocks and madonna uttering the diapason of woe. I hear a wild hysterical laugh, a room full of lockjaw, and the body that was black glows like phosphorus. Wild, wild, utterly uncontrollable laughter, and that crack laughing at me too, laughing through the mossy whiskers, a laugh that creases the bright, polished surface of the billiard ball. Great whore and mother of man with gin in her veins. Mother of all harlots, spider rolling us in your logarithmic grave, insatiable one, fiend whose laughter rives me! I look down into that sunken crater, world lost and without traces, and I hear the bells chiming, two nuns at the Palace Stanislas and the smell of rancid butter under their dresses, manifesto never printed because it was raining, war fought to further the cause of plastic surgery, the Prince of Wales flying around the world to decorate the graves of unknown heroes. Every bat flying out of the belfry a lost cause, every whoopla a groan over the radio from the private trenches of the damned. Out of that dark, unstitched wound, that sink of abominations, that cradle of black-thronged cities, where the music of ideas is drowned in cold fat, out of strangled Utopias is born a clown, being divided between beauty and ugliness, between light and chaos, a clown who when he looks down and sidelong is Satan himself and when he looks upward sees a buttered angel, a snail with wings.
Comic books and the big screen (and a small Iron Man film review)
I didn't read comic books growing up. I don't think my parents were immersed enough in American culture yet to get me involved in things like baseball or comic books; things that are quintessentially American. So even though my parents were very insistent on my reading at a young age, what I read was determined by those around me - my teachers and my friends. I just wasn't friends with kids that read comic books. I read primarily science-fiction and pre-teen books.
The comic book culture, or rather fanaticism, always intrigued me. Kids who were comic book collectors started as a young age and did so into their teens and twenties...like my friend Bucky for example. He has an entire room in his garage that's housing his comic book collection. It's something he doesn't intend on parting with, until he has to find a way of putting his kids through college. Comic book collectors/readers remain loyal to their superheroes for an entire generation. It's a loyalty that's passed on to kids and grandkids.
Until recently, I didn't understand the fascination with comic books. Then I started talking to some friends about them. I was thoroughly intrigued when I heard about the depth of character, the complexity of plot, the role of philosophy (good vs. evil, love vs. hate, egotism, morality, death, conflict, etc.) that proliferate throughout these graphic novels. Every character ever created could seemingly have a 500-page character study or psychological profile done about them - their motivations, their flaws, their inspirations, their childhoods, how the events in their lives impacted every decision they've made and would make. Comic book characters are some of the most well-developed literary characters ever created, and why shouldn't they be? They develop over decades, through thousands of issues and graphical frames.
Which drives me to pose the question: why can't films based on comic books provide that same visceral depth that comic book creators Stan Lee and Bob Kane spent years developing? I know that comic books have an advantage because of the medium. However, most comic book films act as testaments to advancement in film and CGI technology rather than portrayals in richness of character, story, philosophy, and conflict.
When I saw Batman Begins, I thought it got about as close as any film has ever gotten. I walked out of the theatre immensely appreciating the effort that went into creating the backstory of a very troubled soul. Now, after discussing it with my comic book nerd friends, it was made very clear to me that Batman is one of the greatest comic book characters ever developed, that he is so intriguing and has such a loyal following. The reason: he's one of the few and the most famous superheroes who actually has no supernatural ability (and no supernatural weakness). He relies on his humanity and his moral grounding to act as the motivational force in his life. His darkness, his sadness is his sole motivator and his bane. As a result, his fans can most closely relate to him. They can feel like in each of them is a Bruce Wayne and thus, a Batman. I was shocked at how mixed the reviews were for Batman Begins even though it was widely-acclaimed by audiences and the highest grossing films of 2005.
The complaints?
Common words I found include "boring", "dull", "monotonous".
My favorite was Ann Hornaday from the Washington Post who panned it. She said Batman Begins was "A ponderous, deeply unironic psychological portrait with such a pervasive sense of gravitas that it borders on self-importance."
Wow...say that with the right inflection and it actually sounds like a rave review. It sounds like the critics were looking for a brainless, witless summer film and instead got a thorough, well-developed portrait of a fictional character with great depth and a dark personal struggle. God forbid.
For the same reasons that many critics panned it, I loved it. I saw it a second time and liked it even more. I loved how human the film felt. I love how you feel like you're getting to really know Bruce Wayne in the same way you might've by reading the graphic novels. Perhaps it was too human, even for the loyal comic book fans. I was told that Christopher Nolan veered slightly too far from the "light-heartedness" of comic books, making the dialogue more serious than a real fan might've wanted. As a guy who doesn't read comic books, maybe that's why I appreciated it more.
(An aside, even though it wasn't a comic book film but rather a real-life superhero film, that's why I loved Unbreakable. It was an homage to all comic book characters done in a way that we could all relate to it as human beings.)
So when I heard all the rave reviews about Iron Man, from critics and fans alike, I couldn't wait to go see it. I instantly thought we were watching a renaissance of the comic book film as a reputable and critically-acclaimed genre.
Well, I didn't feel it.
What I got was a well-made summer action film that lacked little depth and only brushed upon the character. I never bought it. I found it cheesy and contrived at points. I found Tony Stark to be little more than a playboy who gets morally grounded the same way any protagonist is: when the antagonist, who is a close friend of his, betrays him. Iron Man was little more than the standard superhero film with a new skin. That said, I appreciated the awesome special effects, the witty banter, and the fun. I have a feeling that the hollowness I felt may be due to the relative weakness of Iron Man as a comic book character rather than the film. But I really don't know. In general, I didn't see beyond the summer action flick and that bummed me out.
I would love to hear peoples' thoughts here.
An epic passage from Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf
I'm realizing that this could end up being my favorite Hermann Hesse book to date:
"There is much to be said for contentment and painlessness, for these bearable and submissive days, on which neither pain nor pleasure is audible, but pass by whispering and on tip-toe. But the worst of it is that it is just this contentment which I cannot endure. After a short time it fills me with irrepressible hatred and nausea. In desperation I have to escape and throw myself on the road to pleasure, or, if that cannot be, on the road to pain. When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so-called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn in me than the warmth of a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to pull off the wigs of a few revered idols, to provide a few rebellious schoolboys with the longed-for ticket to Hamburg, or to stand one or two representatives of the established order on their heads. For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity."
Amen Mr. Hesse. Amen.
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