I feel like I betrayed myself, my family and some of my friends because I did not like this book more. My statement seems a bit rough but my heart is really heavy. This is why!I started this book 10 years ago while on a trip to Mumbai. Where else! As I was studying in Italy at that time I bought the book in Italian. I remember that I loved what I read but dropped it somewhere at page 200 in order to read it in the original language, English. I do not know how and why but 10 years have passed bef...

This is an awful book. Awful. Full of beginners-grade philosophy that we're meant to think is profound, and horrible pretentious characters who talk like actors in a Victorian stage play, and dreadful over-embellished prose that litters every single ghastly page. I say every page. Perhaps it's not true, because I didn't read the final 90% of the book. I gave up the minute I reached the following quote:'My eyes were lost swimming floating free in the shimmering lagoon of her steady even stare. He...

Like Marmite, or Vegemite - another Australian export - you either loved this book or hated it. I hated it. I really, really hated it. It was a waste of my life enduring five chapters of this egotistical drivel by someone who thought their life was 933-pages worth of importance. He was an escaped convict from an Australian prison and I bet his fellow prisoners and warders must have sighed with relief to no longer be victims of this self-righteous man's endless burble of cod-philosophy, 'deep' in...

I moved this from my "currently reading" shelf to my "read" shelf because there is no "I gave up on this piece of crap" shelf. 600 pages into it, I had to set myself free by throwing it in the toilet. No, seriously, I threw it in the toilet. Then I had to fish it out and clean the deluge of toilet water all over the place created by this tremendously large and heavy piece of crap book. This book makes me angry because I will never get that 600 pages of my life back. I could have been doing somet...

The way Roberts describes Indians in this book is like a series of bad caricatures - I cringed terribly. There is the over-friendly and smiling, trusting, barbaric, not very clever, poor Prabaker - (I HATED the way he wrote Prabaker's English. It made him sound like a racist Disney character or like the golum from LOTR) to the cool and smooth Iranian gangster (if you like ridiculous Bollywood movies, this is the book for you!) In typical fashion, the white guy is the hero of nearly every scene, ...

This is possibly the best book I've ever read. It was given to me by a friend of mine who loved it, and said that before she read it she had no desire to go to India, but after having read it she couldn't wait to go.This book is over 900 pages, so I found it a little challenging to start b/c I didn't want to carry it around with me to read on the bus (too bulky) and I was so tired each night that I couldn't read more than a page or two. But I finally got a chance to read a small chunk of it in o...

My god. What an incredible load of drivel this is. Though there is room in the world for large stories largely told, Gregory David Roberts' self-aggrandazing pseudo-autobiography teems with ludicrously bad prose, characters so flat I'd like to use them to keep water off my bathroom floor, dimwitted philosophy, and self-love. I quite literally had to stop reading from embarassment at the sex scenes ("my body was her chariot and she rode me into the sun"? ye gods), and repeatedly found myself sayi...

If I met the protagonist, Linbaba, in the flesh, I'd, well, I'd beg my meatiest friend to rough him up. Repeatedly. Lin's adventures in Bombay are apparently based on humble author Gregory David Roberts's exploits playing savior and mafiosi there while in hiding after a daring escape from an Australian prison (thanks for a fellow goodreader for correcting me ---I had previously written New Zealand). LinBaba becomes irksome and tiresome after Part 1, repeatedly offering little nuggets of pseudowi...

I managed 200 pages of this utter drivel before giving up completely. Poorly-written nonsense which is gathering critical acclaim from people who probably read one book a year. At one point - during a scene when the narrator is looking at a river - he ACTUALLY writes: 'I was thinking of another river. A river that runs through all of us. The river of the heart.'I do not have time in my life for this sub-Danielle Steel horseshit.EDIT: About ten years on I still keep getting activity on this revie...

There's enough reviews on this book I'm not going to summarize it again. I love this book, and yes it's massive but I think I've read it 3 times. It's not perfect but the parts that are great make up for the wobbly bits. I thought I'd throw in some of the lines I liked:"The world and I are not on speaking terms," Karla said to me once in those early months. "The world keeps trying to win me back," she said, "but it doesn't work. I guess I'm just not the forgiving type.""If you want to curdle the...