SOMETHING TO READ FOR A CHANGE : THE WINNER STANDS ALONE

Allthough this is mainly a blog on films I will occasionally share my thoughts on the books I have read aswell. This is one of these cases :)
Now, the risk one runs in reviewing such writers as Paulo Coelho is that one realizes that one simply has nothing left to say. It is as if somehow all has been said before. And when reviewing successful writers, one must always be careful as to how one says what one has to say otherwise I feel there is not much point… However, to my way of thinking, The Winner Stands Alone was such a great work that I could not possibly leave it unmentioned…
“This is not a thriller” says Coelho in his short introduction “but a stark portrait of where we are now.” This is undoubtedly true. The Winner Stands Alone lays bare the entire capitalist society and all its trappings and trickery set in possibly one of the shamest industries in a world based purely on “image” – the cinema. But the setting is any day in the film industry but the prestigious Cannes Film Festival no less. Now I’m sure you all realize that I adore the cinema and wouldn’t’ have started a blog about it if I did not… But I believe it was Rupert Graves (one of my favorite actors incidentally) in one of his interviews who described acting as “grown men and women playing make believe” – and who can fail to see the parallelism of the cinema with our world today where we have so many roles to juggle, appearances to keep up and where almost all of us dream of money, fame and glory “one day” “somehow”…
Besides asking whether it should really be this way and showing us the ugly backstage of glamour and what us mere mortals must do to realize our dreams of glory that may even not be our own, Coelho also delves into the human psyche. Such eternal subjects as love, jealousy, obsession and madness are explored with mind-numbing skill… It is not only a criticism of society as a whole but of what the individuals in this unnatural state have become…
The winner stands alone may not be a thriller but it is indeed thrilling from beginning to end. And you may say that well, after a tiring day at work you do not need to think about “where we are today”. I say read it anyway. The setting for all these messages is a griping tale of obsession and murder, a true page-turner in its own right, even without any of the underlying messages. I guarantee that you will go through it at break-neck speed from beginning to end. And in a world where advertisers play practically exclusively to our sub-consciousness, a few more underlying messages will do no harm 