I felt emotionally invested, but never fully addicted because of the long descriptive musings frequently scattered throughout the book. Your portrayal of heroin is uncomfortably raw and unexpectedly beautiful. Just thinking about it makes me heavy, like a gray cloud has floated over my head and exerted more gravity upon by my body. Then there was the masterpiece of going under with heroin. Did he do it? Was that that infamous Indian head wag? Did other people lighten up when they saw it? And the under-underpants! I saw Indians bathing on the streets and cracked up thinking about their under-under pants and never nude state. The Indian head wag was such a fun detail that I began to observe the head movements of all the men in India, getting excited if the movement could be interpreted as a wag.
You captured the Indian way – or at least I felt you did based on my experience of only being in India for ten days. The best parts are when you move along with the crazy things you did…or didn’t do. You’re a wise soul and I grew to love you, but please get on with the story. Still, it became boring the fifth time around. Your writing captured those prophetic realizations beautifully. Having recreated all those discussions of philosophy with the mafia boss – smoking hashish and musing about how the world is growing more complicated, I know getting it all down must have been a feat. You should be, you worked really hard at it, writing things down and memorizing all those passages, mentally putting this book together year after insufferable year of your life. I get it the first 26 times you describe Karla and her damn green eyes (although that’s one word you didn’t use to describe them). Oh David you can write! Eloquently and beautifully…I get it.
The main character/author, Gregory David Roberts, is a profoundly observant Australian with a poetic nature. It wasn’t written by an Indian author, it wasn’t about an Indian family and it wasn’t about an Indian person per se, but one can argue, the protagonist ends up pretty Indian. You just have to!! It was definitely different from the other books on similar lists. I was told by various websites that if you’re going to India, you have to read Shantaram.
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