65 of 70 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
. . . Or Maybe It's Just the Smell?, May 2, 2009
This review is from: The Winner Stands Alone: A Novel (Hardcover)
A funny thing happened to me on the way to the closing chapters of Paolo Coelho's new book "The Winner Stands Alone" . . .
I never got there.
I love Coelho's work. My shelves hold copies of any and all of his titles(translated into English). I've taught many of his books in both my collegiate literature and religious studies courses. And it a very rare thing, indeed, for me not to finish any book, and never before one of Coleho's.
But I simply couldn't plow through another page of this one.
When Coelho was elected a (French) "Knight of Arts and Literature," there were some few (but significant) voices saying that he did not belong, that he was not a serious writer. Could this criticism have gotten to the world's best-selling author? Impossible to know, but it would appear that Coelho struggles mightily in "Winner Stands Alone" to stand with those pantheonic others -- the Hemingways and Steinbecks, the Garcia Marqez's and Saramago's of the literary world. And he just doesn't make it.
Coelho, at his best, is a parabalist, and a wonderful one. Parable is in and of itself a serious art form, as Dickens, Saint-Exubery, Hermann Hesse, Shalom Alecheim, and even Shakespeare knew well. But when a parabalist tries to be something other than a parabalist, more often than not the effect is something like Pete Seeger trying to do opera. The voice is never right, and what is powerful expression in one form becomes needless repetition in the other.
This is the case with "Winner Takes It All." Parable has its own tone of voice, and its characters don't need to be distinguished from each other in any but oversized ways (good, evil, innocent, seductive). That very lack of sophistication is part of the mythic appeal of parable. But when one tries to apply the same gifts to a literary novel, what results is characters of two weak dimensions (rather than one, powerful, primitive one), and a narrative tone that has shifted from godlike to simply condescending. Parable operates in almost poetic fashion; the impact of the short, intense, emotionally perfect line says it all. In this novel, the poetic moment is rare. Rather, Coelho regales us with paragraph upon paragraph of repetitive prose that feels rather like cotton packing -- one keep hoping that if one removes enough of it, whatever is being so safeguarded will reveal itself. It never does (or at least not in the first 200 pages). Rather, as if unsure that his point is being made ("Cannes is the embodiement of our shallow, materialistic, spiritually dead culture"), Coelho keeps heaping it on until the entire novel suffocates under the weight.
Coelho is not the first great writer to suffer from "genre envy." America's finest living poet, Wendall Berry tries to be a novelist; Paul Auster, its best novelist, attempts poetry. Perhaps it's something the gifted need to try from time to time, some sort of built-in humility mechanism. My hope is that Coelho has had his fling at Parnasus, and soon will return to the pilgrim's road, where he has won so often and where we always can walk with him to the end.
Sometimes it's not the winning that causes the standing alone. It's the smell.
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29 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A Spectacular Failure, April 27, 2009
This review is from: The Winner Stands Alone: A Novel (Hardcover)
I like Coelho. I like him because his books are simple. Straightforward. And to no small degree uplifting. Inspirational. I can read one of his books and feel good about myself and the world (to some degree). So enter The Winner Stands Alone with the super rich psychopath Igor eliminating worlds (you figure that out - not a stretch) to convice or terrorize his ex wife to return to him during a day at the Cannes Film Festival.
The book fails because he spoons us the obvious; a successful producer whose success has been achieved through money laundering, a struggling actress who is getting the break she has always dreamed of, an independent film director who has slogged five years on a project but hasn't been able to get it shown until possibly now, a fashion model who doesn't know if she wants the fame that is being handed to her, and so on. Does he want us to judge these dreams or does he judge them through his psychopath? What have these dreams to do with the random actions of a disturbed mind? Is it only that a psychopath could exist in this miasma of be's and wanna be's.
There are a few memorable characters; the personal assistant who babysits the actress, the investigator who while abhored at the events secretly wants them to continue so he can finally have an opportunity to solve a significant crime. They are interesting but the flesh hardly hangs on their bones before Igor fires the final shots and the winner is declared.
I love Coelho's books not because he skewers my reality but rather because he offers another reality, another personal journey outside of it. This is where he excels. And where he should remain. Winner Stands Alone is a spectacular failure.
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13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Being afraid of the dark only gives it more power, July 27, 2009
This review is from: The Winner Stands Alone: A Novel (Hardcover)
Paulo Coelho's new book, The Winner Stands Alone, was a read that I had to fight myself not to put down not because it was so good, but because it was as dark as these reviews / sentiments confirm.
As I plowed through the darkness, just to honor my commitment to finish what I start, I kept wondering why the writer of something as magical as The Alchemist would write something so heavily into the dark side of the force.
As soon as I finished the book I started reading Coelho's The Valkyries for the second time. The characters in this book are on a quest to speak with and see their angels.
The Valkyries made me realize that part of our quest is to be comfortable in both the light and the dark without being consumed by the darkness. Being afraid of the dark only gives it more power.
Mid way through the book, as I was about to chuck it, I would give it a rating of 1, for the reasons that I have stated, I'm giving it a 5.
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