Category Archives: Book Review

Warrior of Light – Issue no. 197 – A Model’s Routine by Paulo Coelho

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In order to write the book “The Winner is alone”, the main theme of which is the cult of celebrities, I had to do some interesting research into the routine of those women who inhabit the collective imagination: photographer’s models. However different they may be, what follows is an invariable pattern of behavior among them:

A] Before going to bed they use several creams to clean the pores and keep the skin hydrated — from an early age making the organism dependent on foreign elements. They wake up, drink a cup of black coffee without any sugar, and some fruit with fibers — so that the food that they ingest during the rest of the day passes quickly through the intestines. They climb on the scales three to four times a day and become depressed by each excessive gram denounced by the needle.

B] They are all aware that they will soon be upstaged by new faces and new tendencies, and they need urgently to show that their talent goes beyond the catwalks. They are constantly pleading with their agents to arrange a test for them so that they can show that they are capable of working as actresses — which is their big dream.

C] Unlike what the legend claims, they pay for their expenses — travel, hotel, and all those salads. They are invited by fashion designers’ assistants to do what they call casting, to select those who will be picked to face the catwalk or pose for a photo session. At that moment they are in front of people who are invariably ill-humored and use the little power they have to pour out their daily frustrations and never say a nice or encouraging word: “horrible” is the comment most commonly heard.

D] Their parents are proud of the daughter that has begun so well, and regret having ever said they were against that career — after all, she is earning money and helping the family. Their boyfriends have fits of jealousy, but control themselves because it’s good for the ego to be with a fashion model. Their girlfriends envy them secretly (or openly).

E] They go to all the parties they are invited to, and behave as if they were far more important than they actually are, which is a symptom of insecurity. They always have a glass of champagne in their hand, but this is just part of the image that they want to send out. They know that alcohol contains elements that can affect their weight, so their favorite drink is mineral water (still – although the gas does not affect the weight, it does have immediate consequences for the contour of the stomach).

G] They sleep badly due to the pills. They hear stories about anorexia — the most common disease in the milieu, a kind of nervous disturbance caused by obsession with weight and appearance which eventually educates the organism and rejects any type of food. They say that this won’t happen to them. But they never notice when the first symptoms appear.

H] They go directly from childhood to the world of luxury and glamour without passing through adolescence and youth. When asked about their plans for the future, they always have the answer on the tip of their tongue: “I want to go to university and study philosophy. I’m just doing this to be able to pay for my studies”. They know that this isn’t true. They can’t afford to attend school: there’s always a test in the morning, a photo session in the afternoon, a party which they have to attend to be seen, admired and desired.

People think they lead a fairytale life. And they want to believe this. Until some more curious writer decides not to give up, and questions a bit further. After a great deal of hesitating, they eventually say: “I was born to be an actress. So I am capable of pretending that this miserable life is the most glamorous profession in the world”.

The measure of love

“I have always wanted to know if I was able to love like you do,” said the disciple of a Hindu master.

“There is nothing beyond love,” answered the master. “It’s love that keeps the world going round and the stars hanging in the sky.”

“I know all that. But how can I know if my love is great enough?”

“Try to find out if you abandon yourself to love or if you flee from your emotions. But don’t ask questions like that because love is neither great nor small. You can’t measure a feeling like you measure a road: if you act like that you will see only your reflection, like the moon in a lake, but you won’t be following your path.”

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The Winner Stands Alone : Chapter VIII by Paulo Coelho

Book Review,

She drinks her coffee and begins to understand her bad mood. She’s surrounded by some of the most beautiful women on the planet! She certainly doesn’t consider herself ugly, but there’s no way she can compete with them. She needs to decide what to do. She had thought long and hard before making this trip, money is tight, and she doesn’t have much time in which to land a contract. She went to various places during the first two days, giving people a copy of her CV and her photos, but all she achieved was an invitation to last night’s party at a cheap restaurant, with the music at full blast, and where she met no one from the Superclass. In order to lose her inhibitions, she drank more than she should and ended up not knowing where she was or what she was doing there. Everything seemed strange to her — Europe, the way people dress, the different languages, the phoney jollity – when the truth was everyone was wishing they could have been invited to some more important event, instead of being in that utterly insignificant place, listening to the same old music, and having to hold shouted conversations about other people’s lives and the injustices committed by the powerful on the powerless.

Gabriela is tired of talking about these so-called injustices. That’s simply the way it is. They choose the people they want to choose and don’t have to explain themselves to anyone, which is why she needs a plan. A lot of other young women with the same dream (but not, of course, with as much talent as her) will be doing the rounds with their CVs and their photos; the producers who come to the Festival must be inundated with portfolios, DVDs, business cards.

What would make her stand out?

She needs to think. She won’t get another chance like this, largely because she’s spent all her savings on this trip. And — horror of horrors — she’s getting old. She’s twenty-five. This is her last chance.

While she drinks her coffee, she looks through the small kitchen window at the dead-end street down below. All she can see is a tobacconist’s and a little girl eating chocolate. Yes, this is her last chance. She hopes it will turn out quite differently from the first one.

She thinks back to when she was eleven years old and performing in her first school play at one of the most expensive schools in Chicago. Her subsequent desire to succeed was not born of the unanimous acclaim she received from the audience, composed of fathers, mothers, relatives and teachers. Far from it. She was playing the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland. She had got the part — one of the best roles in the play — after auditioning along with a lot of other girls and boys.

Her first line was: ‘Your hair wants cutting.’ Then Alice would reply: ‘You should learn not to make personal remarks, it’s very rude.’

When the long-awaited moment came, a moment she had rehearsed and rehearsed, she was so nervous that she got the line wrong and said instead: ‘Your hair wants washing.’ The girl playing Alice said her next line anyway, and the audience would never have noticed anything was wrong if Gabriela, who knew she had made a mistake, hadn’t promptly lost the power of speech. Since the Mad Hatter was an essential character if the scene was to continue, and since children are not good at improvising on stage (although they improvise happily enough in real life), no one knew what to do. Then, after several long minutes, during which the actors simply looked at each other, the teacher started applauding, announced it was time for an interval and ordered everyone off-stage.

Gabriela not only left the stage, she left the school in tears. The following day, she found out that the scene with the Mad Hatter had been cut, and the actors would instead move straight on to the game of croquet with the Queen. The teacher said this didn’t matter in the least because the story of Alice in Wonderland is a lot of nonsense anyway, but during playtime, the other girls and boys ganged up on Gabriela and started beating her.

This wasn’t so very unusual — it was a fairly regular occurrence – and she had learned to defend herself as energetically as when she, in turn, attacked the weaker children. On this occasion, however, she took the beating without uttering a word and without shedding a tear. Her reaction was so surprising that the fight lasted almost no time at all; her schoolmates expected her to scream and shout and, when she didn’t, rapidly lost interest. For with each blow, Gabriela was thinking:

‘I’ll be a great actress one day and then you’ll be sorry.’

Who says that children aren’t capable of deciding what they want to do in life?

Adults do.

And when we grow to be adults ourselves, we believe that we really are wise beings who are always right. Many children had doubtless been through a similar experience, playing the role of the Mad Hatter or Sleeping Beauty or Aladdin or Alice, and decided there and then to abandon the spotlights and the applause. Gabriela, though, had never before lost a battle; she was the prettiest and most intelligent student in school and always got the best marks in class; and she knew intuitively that if she didn’t fight back at once, she would be lost.

It was one thing to get a beating from her schoolmates — because she could give as good as she got — but it was quite another to carry a failure like that around with her for the rest of her life. As we all know, a fluffed line in a school play, an inability to dance as well as everyone else, or rude comments passed about skinny legs or a big head — which all children have to put up with — can have two radically different consequences.

Some people opt for revenge and try to be really good at whatever it is the others thought they couldn’t do. ‘One day, you’ll envy me,’ they think.

Most people, however, accept their limitations, and then things tend to go from bad to worse. They grow up insecure and obedient (although they dream of a day when they’ll be free and able to do whatever they want), they get married to prove that they’re not as ugly as other kids said they were (although deep down they still believe they are), they have children so that no one can say they’re infertile (even though they wanted kids anyway), they dress well so that no one can say they dress badly (although they know people will say that anyway).

By the following week, the incident at the play had been forgotten by everyone at school, but Gabriela had decided that, one day, when she was a world-famous actress, accompanied by secretaries, bodyguards, photographers and legions of fans, she would go back to that school. She would put on a performance of Alice in Wonderland for needy children, she would make the news, and her childhood friends would say:

‘I was on the same stage as her once!’

Her mother wanted her to study chemical engineering, and as soon as she finished high school, her parents sent her to the Illinois Institute of Technology. During the day, she studied protein paths and the structure of benzene, but she spent her evenings with Ibsen, Coward and Shakespeare while attending a drama course paid for with money sent to her by her parents to buy clothes and course books. She trained with the best professionals and had excellent teachers. She received good reviews and letters of recommendation, she performed (without her parents’ knowledge) as a backing singer for a rock group and as a belly dancer in a play about Lawrence of Arabia. It was always a good idea to accept any role that came along. There was always the chance that someone important might be in the audience, someone who would invite her to her first real audition, and then all those testing times and all her struggles to gain a place in the spotlight would be over.

The years passed. Gabriela made TV commercials, toothpaste ads, did some modelling work, and was even tempted to respond to an invitation from a group that specialised in providing escorts for businessmen because she desperately needed money to put together a proper portfolio to send to all the major modelling and acting agencies in the United States. Fortunately, God — in whom she never lost faith — saved her. That same day, she was offered a job as an extra in a video of a Japanese singer, which was going to be filmed beneath the viaduct of the Chicago ‘L’. She was paid much more than she expected (apparently the producers had demanded a fortune in fees for the foreign cast) and with that extra money she managed to produce the vital book of photos (or ‘book’ as it’s known in every language in the world), which also cost much more than she had imagined.

She was always telling herself that she was just at the beginning of her career, even though the days and months were beginning to fly by. She might have been picked to play Ophelia in Hamlet while she was on the drama course, but life mostly offered her only ads for deodorants and beauty creams. Whenever she went to an agency to show them her book and the letters of recommendation from teachers, friends and colleagues, she found the waiting-room full of girls who looked very like her, all of them smiling, all of them hating each other, and all doing whatever they could to get something, anything, that would give them ‘visibility’ as the professionals called it.

She would wait hours for her turn to come, and meanwhile read books on meditation and positive thinking. She would end up sitting opposite someone — male or female — who ignored the letters and went straight to the photos, not that they ever commented on those either. They would make a note of her name. Sometimes, she would be called in for an audition, about one in ten of which bore fruit. There she would be again, with all her talent (or so she thought), standing in front of a camera and a lot of ill-mannered people, who were always telling her: ‘Relax, smile, turn to the right, drop your chin a little, lick your lips.’ And the result: a photo of a new brand of coffee.

And what happened when she wasn’t called? She felt rejected, but soon learned to live with that and come to see it as a necessary experience, a test of her perseverance and faith. She refused to accept the fact that the drama course, the letters of recommendation, the CV listing minor roles performed in minor theatres, were of no use at all…

The 9th Chapter will be posted on Tuesday 24th of February

http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2009/02/16/the-winner-stands-alone-seventh-chapter

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The Winner Stands Alone

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FOLLOW MY DREAM — BUT WHICH ONE?

One of the recurrent themes of my books is the importance of paying the price of your dreams. But to what extent can our dreams be manipulated? For the past decades, we lived in a culture that privileged fame, money, power — and most of the people were led to believe that these were the real values that we should pursue.
We all should be a “winner”. Not in the sense of someone who finally wins what is important to his/her life. Not in the sense that happiness is the most valuable gift on Earth — and it can be attained here and now, when your work fulfills your heart. We should be a winner in the sense that the system portraits a successful person: celebrity, influence, photos in glossy magazines, behaving like the masters of the universe.
Yes, you may reach the goal society has fed you — but will you be satisfied? Will you be whole? Will you be in peace? This cycle of possession never ends — because the moment that you think that you have reached your goal another desire creeps in. And how can you find rest when it is the hunt that moves you?
While people are connected — omniscient thanks to their mobile phones and GPS — they all speak the same words, fight for the same goals, and crave the same things. How could it be otherwise? If fashion exists it is precisely because you can mold the desire of the masses — or how else could a bag, a dress impose itself as necessary?
In a world of invisible yet unsurpassable “diktats”, where a few puppeteers pull the strings of the many, instill in other people’s dreams the pursue of superficial things, there seems to be a rising feeling, a silent despair that creeps in.
Greed to have, greed to be seen, greed to prevail, even greed to kill, if you think it is for a good cause — like love, for example.
What we don’t know is that, behind the scenes, the real manipulators remain anonymous. They understand that the most effective power is the one that nobody can notice — until it is too late, and you a trapped. This book is about this trap.
Soon after I finished writing “The winner stands alone”,  the financial market collapsed. Will this lead us again to the real values? I really don’t know. What I do know is that we cannot continue to allow our dreams to be manipulated like they are as for three of the four main characters in the book:
Igor, a Russian millionaire, who believes that you can kill if you have a good reason for that — like avoiding human suffering, or bringing back the attention the woman he loves.
Hamid, a fashion magnate, who started with good intentions, till he got caught by the very system he was trying to use.
Gabriela, who — like most of the people today — is convinced that fame is an end by itself, the supreme reward in a world that praises ccelebrity as the supreme achievement in life.

As I finish writing these pages, there are currently several dictators in power. One country in the Middle East has been invaded by the world’s only superpower. Support for terrorist groups is growing. Fundamentalist Christians have the ability to elect presidents. The spiritual search is manipulated by various sects each claiming to possess ‘absolute knowledge’. Whole cities are wiped from the map by Nature’s fury. According to research carried out by a reputable American intellectual, all the world’s power rests in the hands of six thousand people.
There are thousands of prisoners of conscience on every continent. Torture is once again deemed acceptable as an interrogation method. The wealthier nations are closing their borders. The poorer nations are witnessing an unprecedented exodus as their inhabitants leave in search of El Dorado. Genocide continues to be committed in at least two African countries. The economic system is showing signs of break-down, and great fortunes are beginning to collapse. Child slavery has become a constant. Hundreds of millions of people live below the poverty line. Nuclear proliferation is accepted as irreversible. New diseases emerge. The old diseases have not yet been brought under control.
But is this a portrait of the world I live in?
Of course not. When I decided to take a snapshot of my own times, I wrote this book.
So please join me in this journey into a world that is coming to an end. You will see glittery, glamour, and blood — but don’t see this book as a thriller: it is a crude portrait of where we are now. We are part of the solution, if we go back to the real values of life, being “follow your dream” the most important of all. Not the dreams of the Superclass. Not the dreams of our parents, or our partners. We should be what we always wanted to be.

The 1st Chapter will be posted on Tuesday 27th of January on Paulo’s blog

Release dates: March 19: UK   /   April: France, Greece, Holland, Russia, USA  /   May: Australia, Iran

ALL ROADS LEAD TO HAZARD

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The stories from Main Street have teeth. They grin and grunt. Today as small town America feels assaulted by Congress and Wall Street, my community feels insulated. We are the end of the road but we are start up.  The characters in my book go through trials posed by drugs, alcoholism, and sexual assaults. They muddle through and bounce back like a mountain echo. They also wander little known trails. Main Street is alive and well and on its way! Read my book to see what freedom there is in an off road mecca, like Hazard, Kentucky. It is lean fiction. No bones about it! Trials and trails go hand-in-hand.
See http://www.hazardgal.com