Vivi Liu Liu itibaren Northampton, PA 18067، ایالات متحده آمریکا
I am not going to write any spoilers about the plot so i don't ruin it for people, but I will spoil it for people who have been looking forward to another Coelho book by giving my harshest review. Now, i get to be harsh because I am one of Paulo's biggest fans, and I take his work very seriously, and trust me, I had been looking forward to this book for the past 6 months. Needless to say, I was highly disappointed. I would have given the book two and a half stars just because there was some valuable information in it and it was a quick read. This book is different than the rest of his works, even though Veronika Decides to Die was different when it was published too, but it too included a self-search, etc. The Winner Stands Alone is seriously not your typical enjoyable Coelho read. To elaborate on that, I am making a list of the things i did NOT like: 1- Too many charachters that did not add any postitive impact to the plot. 2- Scattered thought about very random things and issues. 3- I felt as though Coelho went to Cannes Fils Festival, hated it, and wanted to complain about it. 4- I also felt he really rushed to write all the ideas and publish a book without really formulating the full scope on the characters, the story, and the plot. 5- Knowing Coelho's background, I believe that he felt as though there were so many wrong things in the world that he would like to fix but cannot, and therefore decided to include them in a book so that people's interest in these issues is triggered, (e.g. blood diamonds, going "green", teenage violence, apathy and indifference, economic inequality, superfecialness, plastic surgeries, etc). 6- The book was generally just very negative, which is really unlike Coelho. He made it seem that everyone is unhappy, and there is no way that anyone at any positision or situation or lifestyle can ever achieve real true happiness. Everyone was miserable in the book, the businessman, the writer, the actors, the directors, the distributors, the journalists, and models, the assistants, the police officers, and the general public. 7- I think that this book could have been devided into 6 books if Paulo took his time and really went into each character and developed its own story. Would have had a much better outcome. Ok, so now that I am done ranting about what i did not like, let me tell you what I liked. Igor is the most intruiging character: the vigilante, the lover, the man who believes he is doing the work of God. He almost reminded me of the Stranger in the Devil and Miss Prym. What I really liked about this charachter is that, similar to other Coelho charachters, he believed he talked to his angel/guardian/God, but the best part is that this entity is not a benevolent good spirit, it's spiteful and orders him to kill. It kind of freaked me out, because I started thinking "how do we know that the guarian we trust is an angel or a demon, or a mere figment of of our good/bad imagination?" So i thought this part was very interesting. I wish he's made the whole book exclusively about Igor's journey through life. My last sentiment is that the ending was very predictable, and the book did not add anything new to my knowledge or intellect. I will continue to love Coelho, and I will expect much better in his next books to come.
I liked this enough to pass it on! Loved the ending... out of the blue and yet could be tracked through the book once you knew the outcome.... ingenious!