Finding happiness in Cannes
Brazilian author Paulo Coelho’s work has gone long way from the meek shepherd boy in the Alchemist written 21 years ago. Today, instead of dreams of innocence, Coelho is dabbling into the world of excess a la Bret Easton Ellis in his new novel The Winner Stands Alone.
The novel is a highly critical look at the Cannes Film Festival for all its bubbly spumante, hot haute couture, power scandals, and wild parties attended by the Botox-beautiful superclass of celebrities, producers, aspiring actors, and directors. Coelho paints vivaciously vicious scenes akin to the BBC’s Planet Earth. The lion producers prey on young fawns getting their big break onscreen. At times, it is a rather symbiotic existence as alpha male directors don’t have power as long as they got that young starlet and yacht.
At the center of this jungle, Coelho places Russian entrepreneur Igor who dementedly wants his ex-wife Ewa back who has run off with haute couture designer Hamid. Igor decides to get her attention by melodramatically proclaiming that he would destroy worlds, that is, he would murder people in the festival. In between chapters, we get the various Cannes characters hamming up their stories on excess like drugs and the usual rock ‘n’ roll.
Is it a winner or does it stand alone?
The Winner Stands Alone, like its superclass, has its deep and provocative angles or lines in each chapter, depending on where you shine your desk lamp. Consider these: “Being normal is following trends, however ridiculous or comfortable,” “Marrying the first person who offers you a decent position in society. Love can wait” or “The soul suffers, suffers greatly, when we force it to live superficially, The soul loves all things beautiful and deep.”
Yet, taken as a whole, Winner is another pop novel at best because Informers has already been done. My problem with Coelho’s writing is that it is superbly clean but not crisp enough to shoot up his ideas. It seems to wallow in a pigsty of predictable drama that all pop books or music do.
It plays too much into the cliché notion that all rich people have poison running through their veins and that young models will become prostitutes. We have been presented these elements before but nothing new is served. It is heavy with a mood that seems contrived like the films the book is trying to lampoon.
Notably, Coelho’s book is too critical of the festival that announced a film on his book The Alchemist. It seems that he didn’t have much fun in the French film festival but enough for a white feather to drop by his window as sign he can write again like his previous works.
At best, Winner is a good pop book to get you through the weekend and feed your anger at the rich in this economic crisis where people are still malling. It is just to remember that bad men come in all shapes and sizes, and are not made just from what’s in their wallet.
Rather than reading this book, you’d be better off with Coelho’s biography if you are looking for how to be happy. According to his Wikipedia profile, young Coelho was sent to the mental hospital for three years by his parents because they didn’t want him to be a writer but a lawyer.
He did become a lawyer, became a writer later on, in the late 1980s, and is now a famous author. I guess the moral is that Happiness happens. You got to look for it in the right places. Be patient because it will be waiting for you. And when you find it, you’ll be a winner.
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The Winner Stands Alone is available at Powerbooks.
Read Paulo Coelho’s book at http://paulocoelhoblog.com/
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Send me happy e-mails at readnow@supreme.ph
