The Mountain Shadow: Shantaram, Book 2

I could not put this book down. It is an amazing work of fiction based on the personal story of the author. It is the follow up book to his first wonderful text, Shantaram. Both are over 900 pages each and totally absorbing and inspiring. This writer is also a poet, polyglot, and humorist. He is able to laugh about his various clashes with the caste system, corruption, and a deep love. At the same time he is a critic and interpreter of daily conflict and the meaning of love. As you read this book, you come to care about every character in their madness and eccentricity and want to be there in Bombay in the 1980’s. The author loves India and India is actually a key character since it is by living and loving in Bombay he comes to resolve the major conflict in his life. I will keep this book to reread it with gratitude for so skilled a story and by extension so skilled a writer.

After replacing books with series and online movies for quite sometime, this was a great book to get back into the swing of things and test out tablet reading. It is a long book, where the explanations are sometimes drawn out and a little soppy, but I suppose it is for those that need more words to kickstart the imaginative process. It kept me going until my eyes blurred and I often referred to the characters as my "late night friends". There is a deep sense of humanity and spirituality in the book, whilst always keeping you in touch with reality in a world filled with inequality. I got a little lost in the spiritual side of things, but the attention to detail and the play on words is admirable and kept me reading. The imagination of this man is truly amazing and I will forever be mulling over the truth of it all. It was great to get lost in an alternate world of " reality". Definitely recommend it.

I feel like I waited a long time for this sequel to his first book. This did not disappoint although it had a different tone and cadence. The main character has developed and we take the journey with him willingly. His commitment to love and his awareness of all that surrounds and envelops him draws the reader into his own self-awareness journey. Above all, Gregory is a gifted writer because he can tell a story in such a delicious way. The book contains so many lyrical passages of metaphor, I would stop mid-sentence and re-read it just to savor it. The cover of the book alone makes the reader feel she is entering the adytum. To me, a good book allows me an intimate relationship with the character where I feel as if I had the experience with him firsthand. I recall stories as if a friend had told me about it. And the wisdom or insights shared in the pages planted seeds of ideas that continue to sprout long after the book has been finished. Any writer would appreciate the depth of the characters' development and the artful crafting of this story.

Let's begin at the beginning: This book is not Shantaram. It will not be Shantaram part two. If you read it expecting it to be Shantaram, you will be one of the many disappointed fans. But if you read it with the understanding that it is an entirely different book that just happens to have some of the same characters, you will find it mostly enjoyable. If Shantaram was a painting, Mountain Shadow is a pop song. Other reviewers have noted that it relies heavily on dialogue - and this becomes problematic for a few reasons. If Mountain Shadow were a movie, then the smart-assed, quick-whip lines would be a lot of fun. But in a book, they read amateurish: the ellipses (ie. "O...kay", "And...so?"), and repetitive broken thoughts (ie. "I-- " inserted in between lines, when a character begins a thought but doesn't finish it, multiple times). I hesitate to call it lazy - that sounds harsh - but a book is supposed to set up the tone of the conversation thru prose; it's supposed to *tell*, rather than just show. By contrast, a film should show rather than tell ... But you're not writing a film, GDR! Also mostly gone from the dialogue are the accented agrammatisms that give a cultural context to the language: the book is written in English - but English isn't everybody's first language in the story, na? Shantaram included intentional peculiarities of how an Indian would speak English, whereas Mountain Shadow often fails to make it clear when English is being spoken vs Hindi/etc. It makes everybody seem like a clever native speaker, cleverly firing their clever lines. And it's done at the expense of nuanced character development. After a while, they all sound the same. Another issue with the dialogue is that it's often redundant: We would read a line of Lin narrating his thoughts, and then he'd repeat the same thought aloud as dialogue to a character. Why? And it happens way too often. This is something a good editor should have pointed out. I think GDR intends for this to be a stylistic choice, but honestly it reads a little arrogant. And speaking of redundant (and arrogant... and lazy) ... Where the dialogue *is* broken up by prose, the prose itself is often stiff, abridged, and too colloquial, like how a millennial would text "o man, that's crazy!" to just about everything, rather than reach for a descriptive narrative of the situation. When I recommended Shantaram to my friends (and I've actually bought copies as gifts), the word I used most often to describe it was "sumptuous." The city of Bombay came alive in smells and sights, in philosophy and metaphor. But the Bombay of Mountain Shadow is distant and impersonal. Yes, a lot is changing around Lin, and perhaps GDR's decision to pull back from the tugging on his readers' heartstrings when he describes the Island City was intentional, to set a more menacing tone. But you know what? I didn't like it. There's a lot of action happening around, scenes skipping from one place to another often within a few short pages, and without the rich description I have don't have as much fun following that journey. One more thing to put out there: GDR isn't shy about killing off his characters, obviously. But in Shantaram, he made us fall in love with them first. In Mountain Shadow - partially because of all the violence and characters dropping like flies every few chapters, and partially because of the lack of rich prose - I found myself growing numb to it all. Several important Shantaram characters were killed off in the middle of the novel, after making only a brief appearance at the start, and their death seemed random, like GDR didn't know what to do with them so he killed them off. He seemed not to care about them, and that was evident in the jumpy brevity of the revelation of their deaths. Even toward the very end, when a beloved Shantaram character dies, I didn't feel it as much. You guys should know, it takes 300 pages for Karla to finally show up ... And when she does, the action kinda gets going. All the stuff before that seems like prelude, like Lin is sleep-walking thru life... Which he is! But GDR, come on! WE are not supposed to be sleep-reading thru it!!! I understand GDR was in a different place in his life when he wrote Mountain Shadow than Shantaram, but the book read a little like he was giving up; like he had a screenplay going in his head rather than a novel. Some of the things I did enjoy very much? The philosophical meditations in the chapters with Idriss. In fact, if GDR wrote an entire novel expanding on these philosophies and their origins, I'd read that (and, I think he is). And I'd probably read a follow up to the Lin story, too, if it ever happens... But I would like less smart-assery and more substance. As a fan, I also bought the ebook that has a bunch of extras (deleted scenes and dialogues, illustrations, poems, etc). NOTE: THE KINDLE VERSION SOLD ON AMAZON IS NOT THE ONE WITH THE BONUS MATERIAL. THAT EBOOK IS ONLY AVAILABLE THRU GDR's WEBSITE. And I loved all the bonus stuff, and especially applaud GDR for including the earlier versions of a chapter to illustrate its progression. As someone who writes, I feel rarely brave enough to show a finished work, nevermind an earlier draft. It takes a lot of courage to do that, folks. Thank you, GDR, that was a treat!

I see a lot of negative reviews on here saying this sequel didn’t live up to the first. I disagree. Shantaram was about enlightenment, adventure, friendship, romance, life, and had elements of action. The Mountain Shadow does hold some of the same elements in it, but only sprinkles, of them compared to the first. To me, the genre shifts more so to an adventure/lite mystery/suspense category. The writing is still the same, the characters were still fantastic and lovable, and overall just a great read. Don’t go into this book with the same expectation of continuing the genre, but think of it more as a new adventure with some similar elements. Loved this book. I’d definitely recommend it.

I enjoyed this book, but I felt it wasn't has good as the preceding one, Shantaram. The author writes with beautiful description, the characters are unique and the setting of Bombay, India was fascinating, different and intriquing. The narrator is certainly a complex person who tries to do good things even when he is involved with bad, corrupt and illegal activities. Because I was so fascinated by the main character, I could not put either one of these two books down. And, it was also a sweet love story. My comments on the The Mountain Shadow are the same as for Shantaram....there were too many undeveloped characters that I had trouble keeping straight who they were. And I thought at times the book was too wordy especially some of the dialogue among the characters. The prose could have been reduced somewhat. I want to know more about the narrator now that I have finished both books. I want to know about his life and his love, Karla. I do hope a third book is in the offing. I think that this author is talented, and I found that the philosophical parts of his writing showed a deep and intelligent side to the author/main character.

Just as nothing could've prepared me for Shantaram, nothing could've given me more joy than learning there was a sequel. If you loved Shantaram, you owe it to yourself to read The Mountain Shadow. Even if it's only to spend a few more hours in that world. A few thoughts: You'll enjoy reconnecting with familiar characters like Didier and Karla. You'll meet incredible new characters. You'll fall in love with Bombay and India all over again. You'll find a lot of food for thought. My theory is that this book was written to flesh out the character of Karla. She was kind of an enigma before. By the end of this novel, she is a complex and wonderful, three-dimensional character. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that she's one the most amazing and fierce female characters in literature, especially one created by a male author. I want the final paragraph read as the benediction at my funeral. You owe it to yourself to read this book.

Shantaram has been one of my favorite books I have read so I couldn't wait to get to the 2nd part of the story. The beloved characters return but there is a lot of dialogue in this book, almost like a screenplay. As soon as I got used to the different format, the philosophical discourses were very interesting, thought-provoking, and enjoyable. It felt a bit long-winded at times but was a great read nevertheless.