The Winner Stands Alone: A Novel (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: gift room, nice blonde girl, gala supper, The Winner Stands Alone, The Star, Hamid Hussein (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Carolyn See I used to know a guy who hated daylight saving time. Every time it rolled around, he devoted a week to denouncing it, along with corporate greed, artificially fertilized lawns, the American highway system and white bread. When his wife bought a loaf to make the kids' lunches, he hung it out the kitchen window with a rope. He wouldn't have it under his roof. I agreed with him on principle. There are plenty of things to dislike about our culture. His best friend hated standard time, for instance. It ate up the hours of honest working men; it was part of a system to line the pockets of electricity executives; it was -- like American cars and processed frozen food -- a blight on good people everywhere, etc. These guys would have loved Paulo Coelho, although they might wonder about a novelist who deplores glitz and glamour even as he devotes more than 300 pages to evoking glitz and glamour in all its distasteful excess. Coelho takes for his subject here the Cannes Film Festival, which, in his opinion, stands on very shaky moral ground. "In Cannes," an assistant remarks, "there's no such thing as friends, only self-interest. There are no human beings, just crazy machines who mow down everything in their path in order to get where they want or else end up plowing into a lamppost." Coelho disapproves mightily of the human folly on display in Cannes: the unbridled ambition, the thirst for fame, the lure of haute couture and ostentatious jewelry. He hates dark glasses, because "in a celebrity town like Cannes, [they] are synonymous with status," and he loathes cellphones, which are "leading the world into a state of utter madness." He posits a small group of people whom he dubs the "superclass," who have all the power, all the limos, all the private jets; those who dress in high fashion (the fashion world is one of his principal bugaboos), swill champagne, drive Maybachs (the finest car) and who, if they're women, get regular injections of Botox. But he isn't fond of ordinary people either, who do silly things like wear neckties or eat three meals a day whether they're hungry or not. In short, while he compares Cannes to Sodom and Gomorrah, he's not prepared to let sinners of any social class off the hook, quoting Solomon's "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity" more than once and apparently meaning it. So. Igor, a psychotic Russian phone executive with his own private jet, comes to the film festival in pursuit of his ex-wife, Ewa, who has run off with Hamid, an Arab clothes designer also with his own private jet. Igor aims to kill a few people and notify Ewa on her cellphone, hoping this will motivate her to return to him. Over a period of about 24 hours, he does indeed manage to suffocate a young street vendor using the Russian martial art Sambo and off an important movie distributor using a needle soaked in curare, which Igor blows through a cocktail straw -- this at a crowded lunch party on the beach. He spends the afternoon stabbing an independent film director and leaving a hermetically sealed envelope filled with hydrogen cyanide under an unknown person's door. Several unsuspecting women move through this corrupt and glittering landscape: a 25-year-old model who yearns for a chance at the big time, a 19-year-old model from Africa and that murdered director who has spent her entire adult life making a film for which she seeks distribution. Through them, the author visits the worlds of moviemaking. (Will it surprise many readers to learn that the writer is the least well-paid participant in any project?) And we are told that Los Angeles is "really a large suburb in search of a city." The world of fashion is also held up to scrutiny -- its sins too numerous to mention. Yes, we do live in a sinful world where all is vanity. I'd be a fool to disagree; it would be like coming out in support of processed cheese or puppy mills. But note that at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008 Harvey Weinstein bought the rights to Coelho's best-selling "The Alchemist" and will be producing it with a budget of $60 million. I imagine that Coelho was around there somewhere in that modern Sodom, probably wearing dark glasses because it gets pretty bright at the beach, and maybe even talking into a cellphone. It's the human condition, after all -- all that vanity -- and if you can refrain from blowing curare-soaked needles into the backs of people's necks, it isn't all that bad.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Review

"[This] Brazilian wizard makes books disappear from stores." (New York Times )

"[Coelho's] special talent seems to be his ability to speak to everyone at once. . . . His readers often say that they see their own lives in his own books." (The New Yorker )

"[Coelho's] special talent seems to be his ability to speak to everyone at once. The kind of spirituality he espouses is to all comers. . . . His readers often say that they see their own lives in his own books." (The New Yorker )

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Harper (April 7, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061750441
• ISBN-13: 978-0061750441
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #107,182 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars . . . Or Maybe It's Just the Smell?, May 2, 2009

By	Wayne-daniel Berard "Peace Chaplain" (mansfield, ma United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A Spectacular Failure, April 27, 2009

By	D. Bannister (Calgary, Alberta Canada) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Didn't get much out of this, June 3, 2009

By	Scully "Scully" (Miami) - See all my reviews

I have read almost all of Paulo Coelho's books. Of course there are some I have enjoyed much more than others but usually I can walk away with a little something from all of them. I can't really say that in the case of his latest novel.

Firstly, it reads more like a manual than anything else. He goes on and on and on describing evidently what he feels is the reality of the Cannes world. It's so rote and dry for a work of fiction. He's not writing this as a documentary but it feels that way, like he wants to be the authoritarian on what goes on at Cannes. Cannes is not for writers, this is not his world. I am curious why he wanted to write on this subject. I just kept hoping the plot would take me somewhere good but it never did.

In this book he has this habit of throwing in these little side notes that start off with "According to Scientific research..." Since when does Paulo Coelho need scientific research to validate his work when it's spiritual in nature? I don't like his contributing to the collective unconscious' need for permission from science to believe in something. People are allowed to draw their own conclusions based on their feelings, life experience and opinions. More than science justifying it, it should be the question of how does your beliefs serve you or is what you are concluding about things really working for you in your life? It was just his way of trying to sit in his authority in this book. Even using his "scientific research" to back up his remarks, I still disagree with some of the logic he was using. A scientific observation is one thing, how the human mind uses that to back up certain conclusions is quite another matter. It just made no sense to me why he kept doing that. I felt like I was a captive audience to his opinions rather than an invited guest entering the world of his novel where my time and interest would be treated with respect. I felt he was too opinionated in this book.

The book was really just boring, poorly written and unenlightening. It had this dark feel to it but I felt it wasn't coming from the reality of Cannes but from Coelho himself. This review is not a "shoot the messenger" type thing. The message of the book was an important one but he just did a very poor job delivering it.