Just finished. There's lots to talk about--lots of quotes and ideas that could be pulled and discussed in detail for agreement/disagreement/synthesis with my Personal World View*. But that seems a bit exhausting to do on a blog. So, I'll just stick with some general comments:
Yes, there was plenty to disagree with, to question, to be suspicious of swallowing whole sale, but there was a lot that I liked. Often I feel so critical and perhaps cynical (or at least feel as though the world is) that I don't take time to dwell and celebrate on the good. I feel like culture (and sometimes myself) is too cool, too blasé to enjoy that which is supposed to be inspirational. And my cheesiness radar goes off like I was near a stack of Chicken Soup books...
But, sometimes, I think, it's nice to have a straightforward story that uses philosophy and ideas in a direct manner rather than subtly so that people can ignore them. It almost seems similar to what The Dark Knight does with the Joker as the embodiment of "an agent of chaos"; Batman himself self-consciously manipulating public personas so that people can have some inspiration in their lives, so that they can believe in something bigger than themselves.
Maybe that's a stretch; maybe I'm in a cheesy mood. Either way, the book made me happy that there are authors/people like Coelho who's ultimate goal seems to be to encourage others towards gen
*I didn't see all the capitalization until the second part since I listened to the first part. It did make me giggle--but I often use it to distinguish between truth/Truth, literature/Literature, etc., so I guess I can't judge too much.
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"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it is too dark to read." --Groucho Marx
"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it is too dark to read." --Groucho Marx
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3 comments:
I can see your point and it is nice to have an uplifting tale as opposed to someone going through hell and all kinds or torment before finding the gold at the end of the rainbow.
I like happy stories, I think most of what i read it on the upbeat side.
I guess I just couldn't get involved enough with Santiago to truly care about his journey. And i don't think that's just because it's a less character driven story and more plot driven. I just thought the writing was on the side of not good. :)
I agree with Sarah. In a world where we so often focus on the bad and the negative and where i find myself being cynical, critical and judgmental, it was nice to read a story like this.
~Emily~
I can see that you didn't enjoy how it was written, but as you mentioned in your own post, Eden, that's really not fair to the author. There's two things at play here. First, the translation. It is impossible for us to know how well this was translated, or even how well it could be translated, because secondly there is obviously a huge culture gap here. I enjoyed this book because it forced me to open my mind to a writing style and culture far different from my own. (I will try to elaborate fuller in a post of my own.) While I can understand how reading a British or American author who writes "poorly" could be a big turnoff, I'm not sure if any of our studies have been meta- enough to examine aesthetical writing as it applies to language and culture universally.
The one thing that I recognized as being beautiful about this book is a very insightful look into human nature.
(I don't want to sound too argumentative Eden, since if I was not aware that this was a translation before reading, the wordiness and narrative style probably would have driven me nuts as well, but I tried very hard to look beyond this with that foreknowledge)
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