Facts or Fictions, your Shantaram stands out apart. Hats off Gregory David Roberts! 930+ pages of marvel. Wonderful descriptions. That ends my description review, undoubtedly!
I bought the novel at Chennai Airport, when I was moving from Chennai to Bangalore, on a new job - last April. Now that I have finished it yesterday (the Afghanistan scenes, seem to be of my memory that I have scene (seen) when I was living in USA 94 to 99), I searched for him on the net and emailing now.
This is what he writes about a novel (beautiful!), on the website https://shantaram.com (quoting with permission as he says...(refer end of snip))
What is a novel?
What are the elements that must be found in any piece of writing for it to be considered a novel?
I think it fair to say that traditional definitions of the word "novel" work along these lines:
A novel is a fictitious prose story of book length.
In my view, a novel has six basic elements:
1) It must have a society of characters;
2) They must be undergoing transformations;
3) And those must be in the course of a sustained prose narrative;
4) The sustained prose narrative must be impelled by a plot;
5) And it must be unified by clearly discernible central themes;
6) And to the extent possible, it must be universalised by a complex architecture of allegorical and symbolical sub-strata.
If I write those six basic elements into a single definition, I come up with this:
*A novel
is a society of characters, undergoing transformations, in the course
of a sustained prose narrative, which is impelled by a plot, unified by
clearly discernible central themes, and universalised by a complex
architecture of allegorical and symbolical sub-strata.*
You won’t find that definition in a book, or on anyone else’s
website (unless they took it from mine, which they’re welcome to do).