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.

There is a particular kind of book that arrives at the wrong moment and stays with you for the right reasons. The Mountain Shadow is that kind of book. On the surface it is a novel — a sequel to Shantaram, set in the criminal underworld of 1980s Bombay. But to describe it only that way is to miss what makes it genuinely unusual: it is one of the very few novels in which philosophy does not decorate the story, but grows directly out of it. Gregory David Roberts writes from the inside of experience. His protagonist does not stand at a safe distance from life, observing and concluding. He falls. He fails. He survives — and sometimes, in the middle of surviving, he understands something. This is the texture of Roberts's thinking: it arrives not as argument but as recognition. The reader does not follow a philosopher explaining the world. She watches a man being changed by it. At the center of the novel stands a concept that Roberts calls complexity. This is not a technical term. It is his name for the quality of reality that resists simplification — the fact that good and evil are rarely pure, that love can wound, that betrayal can come from loyalty, that the most honest people can cause the most harm. To live with complexity, rather than flee from it into the false comfort of certainty, is for Roberts the beginning of moral maturity. His sharpest characters — gangsters capable of genuine tenderness, spiritual seekers who make brutal choices — exist precisely to hold this tension open. "The truth is a bully we all pretend to like." But Roberts does not stop at ethics. His thinking reaches further — into cosmology. He argues, quietly and persistently, that the universe itself has a direction: from the Big Bang onward, it moves toward greater complexity, richer structures, deeper connection. Life, consciousness, love, creativity are not accidents in this picture. They are the universe becoming more fully what it is. What is good, in his moral framework, is what tends toward this complexity. What is evil is what destroys it. This is a bold claim for a novel to make. And yet it does not feel imposed. It emerges naturally from the world Roberts builds — a world where every act leaves a trace, where every connection matters, where karma is not a mystical concept but a description of how actions ripple outward through the web of lives. His idea of the tendency field — a kind of pervasive orientation in the universe toward life and connection, which guides without compelling — resonates surprisingly closely with Rupert Sheldrake's morphic field, or with the questions Roger Penrose raises about consciousness and the deep structure of reality. Roberts is not doing science. But he is thinking in the same direction. "Fate is another name for Karma, which is another name for Time, which is another name for Love." Roberts stands in the lineage of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus — thinkers for whom philosophy was inseparable from lived crisis. But where even they ultimately shaped experience into argument, Roberts leaves the thinking inside the situation. His protagonist does not arrive at wisdom. He survives toward it. This is the novel's deepest achievement: it makes philosophy feel like something that happens to a person, rather than something a person produces. The formula that threads through his thinking runs something like this: life → complexity → consciousness → responsibility → connection. That final step — connection — is the one that makes the rest complete. For Roberts, morality is never a private matter. It lives between people, in the space of trust, compassion, and shared experience. The tendency field is not something you carry inside yourself. It is what arises between us. "Every true connection, honest and free, no matter where it occurs, with a flower or saint, is a connection to the Divine." The Mountain Shadow is not a comfortable book. It is long, morally demanding, and refuses easy resolution. But it is also — sentence by sentence — genuinely alive. Roberts writes the way his protagonist thinks: with urgency, with pain, and with the particular clarity that only comes from having run out of illusions. Read it if you believe that novels can still do what philosophy sometimes cannot — hold a question open long enough for it to become real.

I enjoyed reading this very much, I'd dare say as much as the first one! In particular the building on discussions on life and complexity, the comedic elements (ALL of them) and how Lin and all the other brilliant characters have developed in this sequel from the first; in the context of his life style and their correlation to to each other brought to life, so organically, and with such an amazing level of detail. I also found admirable how the Author pays homage to all the other literary greats in a natural and subtle way, through the dialogues between the characters when they discuss literature - it's definitely added titles to my reading list. I'd describe the overarching story in the sequel as very, very, bitter and very, very, sweet, all at the same time, a little bit like a perfect cup of coffee, with which this novel usually went hand in hand with. Can't wait for more of the same!

Love this story as I loved Shanteram. A favourite

コロナの影響で届くのが大分遅れてしまったけど、本自体はきれいでした。ありがとうございます。

I haven't been able to read it yet but based on the reviews & the excellent first book which totally absorbed me I'm sure it'll be just as good! waiting for the first cool days of winter to start then I'll update.

Ho acquistato il libro in quanto ho molto amato il precedente, qui c’è lo sforzo di introdurre i personaggi a chi non ha letto Shantaram, diventa un po’ noioso per chi cercava uno sviluppo più veloce. Non molto accattivante purtroppo.