When I started reading the book I was too preoccupied by the description that it is written by a gangster. And I was expecting harsh langugage, fights, murders, thrills etc like I have read in other books so far. But this book turned out to be a pleasent surprise… Description of the ragged life through poet’s eyes. I must say the auther has gift of beautiful langugae.

yes, he does have a good literary style. Things that we take for granted, like the light bulbs that hang from a long rope of wire at most roadside stalls he describes as swollen grapes attached to slender vines!
The atmosphere is one of danger and intrigue from page one - you know you could never visit those places yourself, but he makes you wish you could!

im probably the only man in the world who didnt think Shantaram was all that. it started off well, in fact the opening page is explosive. Lyndsay and his journey to India, his meeting with Prabakar and his relationship with him are great, as is the vivid description of the city and life in it.

but for me it goes completely insane when the whole mafia, khader and other dudes get into the picture.

its like two separate books, one great, the other not so great.

the part where he goes to Afghanisthan with khader was a bit too much for me but everything that happens in bombay seems plausable and is good to read. Wonder how they’ll cram all this into a movie though.

i dont think they will have a hard time with the movie. probably condense it down to his reason for leaving Aus and how he did that. his arrival and life in bombay, interaction with the mafia and one big explosive event.

i am not reading the post completely n also not th comments
read abt some 600 pages and felt it was boring, have tried to strt it twice again but failed
perhaps i wud never read it
mayb th movie wud b good, this one deserves a short version for sure (its huge)

Well, if you have no patience for the written word you should just watch the movie and give literature a miss.

somethngs r best left to movies…but movies certainly dont make for th best interpretation

recent examples include namesake…look at godfather, althgh everyone likes it, i like th book much bttr (no offences against coppola, apocalypse now was surely an aweosm work)

its just tht shantaram kills u by its length, few of my frnds experienced a similar breakdown with th book.

Godfather even when it came out was never acknowledged to be a good book by any standards. Its pulp fiction if anything.
One or two characters were interesing like Nino but then they had the whole angle with that doctor and Sonny’s mistress which was useless.

Anyway Godfather II was much better and not part of the book at all.

The Godfather is one hell of a book - have you seen the language? Each line is poetic and the sentences flow into each other. It’s a modern epic straddling many diverse characters with ease. Of course, it’s a harsh book about gangsters who kill people for a living, but let’s acknowledge a widely accepted fact: it’s a Classic.
Even Shakespeare was considered “pulp fiction” in his time - he wrote fast and he wrote for money, but that doesn’t take away from his genius.
As far as the movie goes, it is an ‘Adapted Screenplay’ - you shouldn’t expect the book to be neatly tranlated into film - you need to view it as a seperate film.

Mario Puzo himself said he wrote the Godfather simply for the money and commercial success, something he needed after his first two books flopped. (It shows too)

The Godfather is the weakest of all Puzo novels while The Fortunate Pilgrim was a great story, Dark Arena was a Dark character study.

It is the most pulpish of his books, the good thing about it is -
1) the setting - in those days, the Mafia wasn’t something people knew so much about (the whole 5 families, omerta thing which we are used to now was not such a big part of the Amercian consciousness)

2) characters - The characters were simply amazing, Don Vito - strong, saying all the right things, MC the prodigal son, Fontane a veiled account of Sinatra which caused enough controversy.

3) The movie, the job Coppola did with the film, Marlon Brando’s mind boggling return to form and the ‘real’ debut of Al Pacino.

Makes the book look better than it is. I for one read the book before i saw the movie.

nice post gauravjain…. I’m happy as long as u say nice things about FFC and MP…
I don’t think i’m up for Fortunate Pilgrim just yet. Have posted it for future reading (maybe in my 30s) along with Crime & Punishment etc

I agree with thinktank godfather is an awesome book, but when it comes to movies th 2nd is bttr
tht is mayb bcoz screen interpretations of movies r generally not upto th mark.

Th books whch r not so much in popular culture have a much bttr turnout when they r filmed, bcoz popular books r too much overburdened by expectations

well Da Vinci Code was a terribly written book, while the film was a well made if badly paced film. so its not always true, i think people still have the snobbery or are conditioned to believe that book and their literate value is greater than its filmic value.

anyway i thought Godfather III was a cracker as well, so basically the best of the Godfather series, really didnt have much to do with the book (except the Bobby D flashback)

[…] post is mostly triggered by Thinktank’s review of the book ‘Shantaram’, in fact more so by the crumbs that followed the post. The crumbs took a detour from what the book […]