Paulo Coelho: The Devil and Miss Prym

It’s been a while since I last read something by Coelho. I was a great fan of his back at uni, when was it – 10 years ago, maybe more? I read most of his biggest books and was overwhelmed and inspired by them. Right up to the point I read another book of his not so long ago, I think it was Life: Selected Quotations (published in 2007) and I realized that either I got too old for Coelho or he’s just terribly patronizing!

This story is about a small village at the end of the world, Viscos, where just under 300 people live their lives harvesting what they grow in the fields, talking about weather and getting excited about every single tourist that visits their village. The old people, I should add, as all the young generation left Viscos for the hunger of real life, life where thing change and happen, unlike in this small town where every day is the same as another. All this peace of Viscos life is shaken though when one day a stranger comes to town with a plan to put the villagers to a test. A test that is meant to answer the question he’s been looking to answer since his life fell apart. A test to prove that all people are Evil inside and the Good doesn’t exist.

He promises the villagers, through the lips of Miss Prym, the only young person who stayed in Viscos, that they will receive 11 bars of gold if only they kill someone within a week. No matter who - old or sick, someone who will not be missed by anyone else. And all to allow the stranger to prove to himself that if you put people to a test the Evil will always win.

It is an interesting story, about how Good and Evil fight over every human being, about all the Evil that people do when they try to be good, about the choices people have and the way they can justify any choice they make, even if it isn’t right.

If only Coelho focused more on his characters in the story and not on reminding us his moralizing wisdoms all the time. You can tell a story and leave the listener (or reader in this case) to take it in his own way. Or you can give him your answer before he even digests the story. Which one do you prefer? Coelho goes for the latter which I find really patronizing and limiting in the way you could interpret this book.

Interesting story but I just don’t like the style – 2 hearts for the story though.

My rating: YYYYY

Nick Hornby: How To Be Good

Right, so now it does feel a bit like a Hornby overload! Okay, I still like his style and language and the way he describes English mentality but this wasn’t an easy read. I felt really tired reading it, mentally exhausted trying to understand what message the book was trying to convey.

How To Be Good doesn’t exactly tell you how to be good, it touches on various possibilities but puts all of them in such a bad light that you will never feel good after you’ve done them. But in the end I guess it isn’t about you feeling good.

Everyone in the book is good - Katie is doing her good by being a doctor and healing people (yeah, right) and her husband David is being good by giving away his kids’ toys to strangers. The "goodest" person in the whole book is Mr. GoodNews who does good not only by having such peculiar name. Everyone in the book is so good that it makes you feel a bit sick. Which I guess might have been Hornby’s intention. After reading this book the last thing I wanted was to be good…

It's a very sarcastic book which is what makes it a bit of a tough read when somewhere deep in heart you actually want to be good. But interesting anyhow.

So what is the better "good"? Adopting homeless kids or not leaving the husband you can no longer stand? And how do we know we've done something good if we don't know what would happen if we hadn't done it?

My rating: YYYYY