No review this time around. Just a quote. This comes from By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept by Paulo Coelho.
Man runs into an old friend who had somehow never been able to make it in life. ‘I should give him some money,’ he thinks. But instead he learns that he is old friend has grown rich and is actually seeking him out to repay the debts he had run up over the years.
They go to a bar they used to frequent together and a friend buys drinks for everyone there. When they ask him how he became so successful, he answers that until only a few days ago, he had been living the role of the ‘Other’.
‘What is the Other?’ they ask.
‘The Other is the one who taught me what I should be like, but not what I am. The other believes that it is our obligation to spend our entire life thinking about how to get our hands on as much money as possible so that we will not die of hunger when we are old. So we think so much about money and our plans for acquiring it that we discover we are alive only when our days on earth are practically done. And then it’s too late.’
‘And you? Who are you?’
‘I am just like everyone else who listens to their heart: a person who is in enchanted by the mystery of life. Who is open to miracles, who experiences joy and enthusiasm for what they do. It’s just that the other, afraid of disappointment, kept me from taking action.’
‘But there is suffering in life,’ one of the listeners said.
‘And there are defeats. No one can avoid them. But it’s better to lose some of the battles in the struggle for your dreams and to be defeated without ever even knowing what you’re fighting for.’
‘That’s it?’ another listener asked.
‘Yes, that’s it. When I learned this, I resolved to become the person I had always wanted to be. The other stood there in the corner of my room, watching me, but I will never let the other into myself again – even though it has already tried to frighten me, warning me that it’s risky not to think about the future.’
This will be my last Coelho for a while. I’m half way through my stack of ten of his books, so I’m going to put the remainder to one side and read something else for a while. Namely The Book Thief
It’s a bit of a shame that this one came at the half way point, as it was a bit of a dip in the series, I think. The Valkyries
It’s an intensely personal book, a bit of a snapshot autobiography, which says rather a lot about his marriage and his feelings for his wife (and hers for him). They’re often the kind of feelings you ought to keep to yourself. Particularly if your wife is going to read it.
It starts out well enough. His experiences in the desert are quite interesting, and he describes the arid landscape well, putting you right there beside him. After meeting the Valkyries, though, which clearly was a fairly important event in his life, it all gets a bit too intense with long descriptive passages detailing rituals he performs as a part of his quest.
Reviews on Amazon, I see, are equally mixed (although those that liked it tended to love it), so I don’t feel I’ve missed the point entirely. One for the Coelho completists, then, I think.
Price£xx (£xx from Amazon)
This is turning into a bit of a book blog at the moment, isn’t it? Well, more news about that in a few days, perhaps. In the meantime I seem to be reading faster than I ever have before, and I’m clearing my to-read pile at a rate of a book a week. It feels good to be doing that. I’ve spent far too much time with the hand-out London papers.
I do have plenty of books not written by Paulo Coelho, but a couple of months back I bought a stack of 10 of his works for £9.99, and I’m steadily working my way through them, which brings me to The Devil and Miss Prym
I could picture the scenes in this one very clearly indeed. Coelho set it in Viscos, but it read like it was in Brasov, Romania, although on a much smaller scale. Like all of his books, it sets out to explore one simple idea: in this case, what could induce a murder.
A stranger arrives in Viscos with eleven bars of gold. He shows them to a local girl, tempting her to steal one from the spot where he’s buried it on the mountain behind the village and telling her that if the people of the town would murder someone by the end of the week, they can share the remaining ten between them.
Those ten bars, when sold, would be enough to revitalise the whole town, and free them from ever worrying about earning a living again.
So, in essence, does she want to be responsible for tempting the village to kill one of its own?
But there’s a twist. To force her hand one way or the other, the stranger tells her that if she doesn’t reveal his offer to the rest of the inhabitants within a week, he will tell them himself, and then if they decide to do the deed the chances are they’ll do it to her. She, after all, risked letting them lose everything, and they probably wouldn’t take kindly to that.
It’s a book that keeps you wondering what you would do in her situation. If he’s going to tell the whole village anyway, what harm is there in telling them yourself just a few days earlier? Or perhaps you would be able to talk him out of it? Or should you run away?
I won’t reveal what she does, of course, or it would spoil the story, but it is resolved in a believable manner… one way or the other.
Price £7.99 (£5.99 from Amazon
ISBN 0007116055
Author Paulo Coelho
I read my last London freesheet on 17 March, finished the sudoku and switched to reading books. The freesheets take less than six stops to read and do both puzzles, and then litter the tube. Not a good use of trees.
So last night I finished Eleven Minutes
It was patchy. Intriguing for the first half, dipping for the latter but ultimately rescuing itself in the last few pages, it’s the story of Maria, a Brazilian prostitute lured to Switzerland who discovers that love and sex are more meaningful than she thought. In a nutshell.
It’s simply written, like Coelho’s other books, isn’t too taxing and is quick to read. I like the way he plays with the craft of writing, doing little to hide the fact that what you are reading is anything more an a figment of his imagination. When he drops you into excerpts from Maria’s diary he does it with a quick ‘From Maria’s diary later that night…’, rather than trying to smooth the transition from third- to first- person.
He sets out his stall right from the off, making it clear from the start that this is, at heart, a simple fairy tale. From page one:
Once upon a time. there was a prostitute called Maria. Wait a minute. ‘Once upon a time’ is how all the best children’s stories begin and ‘prostitute’ is a word for adults. How can I start a book with this apparent contradiction? But since, at every moment of our lives, we all have one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss, let’s keep that beginning.
And later, a reminder that this is just a story in a book…
…lovely dark girl with her pale eyes and hair as black as the wing of the grauna (the Brazilian bird often evoked by local authors to describe black hair)…
There are references to The Alchemist when he mentions that his main character reads a book about a boy who tends sheep in Spain, and to The Pilgrimage, as Maria walks a small part of the road to Santiago.
It’s certainly not the best of his books I’ve read so far, and nothing has yet trumped The Pilgrimage, but with eight or so to go, it’ll be interesting to see where it sits in the collection, particularly as he admits in the introduction that he was nervous about publishing this one. I think I can see why.
So last week, as part of my boycotting of the London freesheets, I read The Alchemist
A slightly surprising ending, but one that teaches us to not always assume that the grass is greener wherever you’re not. The one thing that jumped out, though, was this quote from page 138, about two thirds of the way through the book:
‘Everyone on Earth has a treasure that awaits him … We, people’s hearts, seldom say much about those treasures, because people no longer want to go in search of them. We speak of them only to children. Later, we simply let life proceed, in its own direction, towards its own fate. But, unfortunately, very few follow the path laid out for them — the path to their destinies, and to happiness. Most people see the world as a threatening place, and, because they do, the world turns out, indeed, to be a threatening place.
‘So, we, their hearts, speak more and more softly. We never stop speaking out, but we begin to hope that our words won’t be heard: we don’t want people to suffer because they don’t follow their hearts.’
It’s as good a justification as has ever been made for not putting off, but grabbing life in both hands and doing today what you’ve always wanted, whatever the consequences, rather than tomorrow, later, or never.
I’ve been reading a lot of European history lately. For research. So it’s been a bit of a relief to switch to something lighter. Perhaps that’s why it took less than three days to work my way through The Pilgrimage.
By Paulo Coelho, it’s the story of his journey on the road to Santiago de Compostela. Having been there last month, and read two other books about the same trip in quick succession, I was keen to see what he had to say about it. I can safely say that he brought out things that I’d never seen in the other books. Or indeed any book at all, come to that.
This is a story of demonic possession, of exorcisms and speaking in tongues. Of harnessing an energy field that flows around the whole world, and of summoning up your personal spiritual guide for company, advice and inspiration. In short, it’s a story with so many more levels than anything else you’re likely to read, going beyond the realms of this world and borrowing unashamedly from the next. It’s also far less about his physical journey from one location to another, and more about his journey of personal discovery.
Of the three books I’ve read on the subject, this is the only one I’ve picked up after riding the train from Irun to Compostela myself, so it was interesting to read of the places I could remember passing through. I could recognise some of the locations, as I recalled them vividly from my own journey; particularly the old railway junk yard at Ponferrada where the old steam trains had been left, piled up on a piece of buckled track to rust and decompose over time. That very spot had been the location of a key event in the book, and was made all the more real by my own memories and, coincidentally, the notes I’d scribbled down in my notebook as I passed through.
I’d not read any Coelho before, so I took this one on faith after it was name-dropped by a casual acquaintance who, it turned out, hadn’t read it anyway. I wish I’d known that before I started: I got to the end needing someone with whom I could discuss it. But, alas, it looks like I’m alone on this one.
Most definitely a recommended read.
Probably moreso than any other book I can immediately call to mind.
