Equivocality

This book annoys me but I like it. Or it’s a great book which also pisses me off. I’ve always been sort of ambivalent about Paulo Cohello, and I wish I understood why.

The theme is very straightforward. A young woman feels that the rest of her life will hold nothing new for her, and tries to kill herself. She fails and wakes up in an mental institution, only to learn that her attempt has damaged her heart and she has only days left to live. In those days, freed entirely from consequence, she learns to live.

That’s it. He does it. It works. The prose is beautifully simple, yet the books feels deep. That’s spiritual writing, all right. He’s to states of grace what Cameron Crowe is to shmaltz: he can pull it off and get to you without it seeming corny. At least not until you try to explain it to someone else.

Problem is, he’s also sort of a dork. It’s clear that Coelho is an educated, progressive man. He considers depression and panic attacks to be treatable diseases and discusses them accurately and kindly, even mentioning serotonin, etc. He is certainly sexually liberated, as one can see particularly in The Zahir and Eleven Minutes. He has a wide knowledge of world affairs and seems, generally, cosmopolitan, modern, intellectual, and compassionate. Unfortunately, he also dumbs down his work, and pushes a belief in god. He has a tendency to make these sweeping statements that sound grand:

She had lost her innocent vision of Justice early on in her career, and had come to understand that the laws had not been created to resolve problems, but in order to prolong quarrels indefinitely.

Yeah, sure, he backs away from that a little bit, but I’m sure that Coelho knows this statement to be false. Or,

If only everyone could know and live with their inner madness. Would the world be a worse place for it? No, people would be fairer and happier.

Yeah, okay, I understand this, and in fact I’ve tried to write about it myself. What Coelho is trying to say here cuts very deep, and arguably needs the rest of the book to support it. But I guess my feeling is, if something can’t be summarized succinctly, then don’t. Let the book speak. Coelho does not. He hams up the conclusion, the moral, the lesson, and shoves it down your throat as a certainty. Perhaps this is the fatal certainty of religious people everywhere; they think that yes, the world does ultimately make sense, and can be taught in simple sentences in Sunday school. Myself, I think bewilderment and curiosity are more appropriate responses to the universe.

Or something. His work is undoubtedly brilliant, and also definitely disturbs me. I wish I could put my finger on it. Maybe I just don’t understand, and what I see as simplification he sees as meeting the mass of humanity at its current level. As someone once said, teaching is the process of telling smaller and smaller lies. I could accept that… but I think I’d also like a bit more humility from the author. I’m tired of prophets.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 26th, 2007 at 9:44 am and is filed under Book Reports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.