Dec 09, 2014 11:32 AM
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The New York Times nailed Shantaram when they said that it is "nothing if not entertaining." The problem is trying to find what else it is.
Nine hundred pages of page-turning narrative and I wonder if I have gained anything by it.
The characters lack fullness and complexity, the narrator is absurd, and the language suffers the burden of passages so heavily cliched and saturated with bite-sized pseudo-philosophical tidbits as to reduce the novel to little more than a self-help book.
