Shantaram

Just finished this massive book.  A long story. A wonderful novel. Full of pain and suffering. Full of love and philosophy. Its a thin line between love and hate. Its a thin line between crime and justice and its a thin line between life and death. The opposite forces are melting together and spins like photons in a trammel. Crashing and creating new energy and drives Lin (the main character) into new hazardous situations and happenings. Torture in prison, fights and participating in war (Afghanistan). He seems to jump like a hungry tiger into this. He should of course be dead long time ago, but like a cat with 9 lives he hangs on, recover and gets ready for new adventures. He belongs to the Bombay mafia, which makes a perfect field for his dangerous adventures. The drive is love, love in friendship, love of family and of course love to a woman. Because Lin loves a lot and people love him. He loves Bombay and find a way to live a life by doing wrong for the right reasons. Well, we will not go into a long discussion about ethics here, but ethics is important through out the book. Lin is a criminal and participate in criminal activities on smaller or greater scale. Except the time he he spends in Prabaker's  village where he gets his name: Shantaram (which means something like 'man of peace'), and the time he spends in jail.

It's an exciting novel, fiction written in a autobiographical style. What's real and whats fiction is of course difficult to know, but the author himself have been a criminal, have been in jail, and have escaped from prison in real life. As reader, I find the main character in the book difficult to love, but impossible not to like.