Book #37 Reviewer: Inspirationalreads After his wife and two young sons die in a air plane crash, David Zimmer descends into a crippling grief. Suicidal and using alcohol as a way to numb his pain, one night he catches a silent … Continue reading
Book #15 Reviewer: Inspirationalreads ‘Twas inevitable that this book was going to be reviewed early on on a blog that is edited by two Kiwi lasses. Set in New Zealand in the mid-nineteenth century, Tremain’s The Colour is a historical … Continue reading
Book # 33 Reviewer: Sweetp I first heard about this book around the time it won a Pulitizer in 2003, and remember thinking I would like to read it. Skip forward some years and I stumbled across a copy at … Continue reading
Book #54 Reviewer: Inspirational Reads Archie and Samad are the unlikeliest of friends. Archie is white, middle-class,with a lean towards insipidness. Samad is a Muslim, devout in his beliefs and sensitive to how foreign his race and religion make him. … Continue reading
Book #19 Reviewer: Inspirational Reads Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. He cannot … Continue reading
Book #41 Reviewer: mum2threecheekykids The blurb on the cover made it sound interesting and an easy read but I found it confusing as it was written in a different style and this made the story hard to follow. Catrine is … Continue reading
This is the first novel by Paulo Coelho that I have read. I was aware of The Alchemist, but had somehow managed to get the idea into my head that Coelho was a “spiritual” type of writer. Also known as a bit “hippie”.
It is certainly true that spirituality is core to this story, but it cannot truly be said to be “hippie”. The Devil and Miss Prym is set in the village of Viscos and is a story of good versus evil and the temptations presented to us in life. Chantal Prym is a disaffected young woman who has lived in the village all of her life. She is pretty much the only young person left and like her peers she wants to leave for a better life elsewhere. She works as a barmaid in the local hotel where visitors come for the hunting season and she often dreams that one of them will take her away for the repetitive life she leads. Berta is an old woman who’s husband died fifteen years before in a hunting accident and has sat at her door watching the village and the countryside ever since. She has sat, waiting, for evil to arrive in the village.
Finally, one day, it arrives.
A stranger arrives in the village and uses Chantal to propose an unthinkable act to the villagers in return for bars of gold and the future security of the village which has been dying slowly. The story plays out the stranger’s scheme to test his idea of good and evil. In the process he drags both Chantal and Berta right into the heart of it all.
I love the easy flow of the writing and the ideas. I wanted to keep reading to see what would happen. Would good or evil win?
The imagery was very nicely done too. For instance, gallows as conscience:
‘Ahab really understood human nature: it isn’t the desire to abide by the law that makes everyone behave as society requires, but the fear of punishment. Each one of us carries a gallows inside us.’
Then there is judgement:
He found one of the most interesting descriptions of this punishment in an Arabian book: there it was written that once the soul had left the body, it had to walk across a bridge as narrow as a knife edge, with paradise on the right and, on the left, a series of circles that led down into the darkness inside the earth. Before crossing the bridge (the book did not explain where it led to), each person had to place all his virtues in his right hand and all his sins in his left, and the imbalance between the two meant that the person always fell towards the side to which his actions on Earth had inclined him.
A little further on he also goes on to say this:
The Chinese were also the only ones to offer a convincing explanation of the origin of devils – they were evil because they had personal experience of evil, and now they wanted to pass it on to others, in an eternal cycle of vengeance.
The whole debate over man’s inclination to be good or evil was very interesting and I completely agreed with his summing up at the end of the novel. I won’t end my review with a spoiler, so you’ll just have to read the book to see if you agree with us. I do think the novel had some weaknesses especially around the responses to temptation, but it didn’t particularly spoil it as a good read. I can recommend this for a good, light read. It was only 200 pages and I finished it in three evenings.
Ratings:
Oh Waily – 4 stars
Goodreads – 3.5 stars
Amazon – 3.6 stars
This sprawling novel is one I have checked out of the library a number of times and never gotten around to reading. I think the size of it coupled with it being widely heralded as a modern classic put me off a little. Boy, was I foolish.
So where to start in summarising this novel. Set over nearly 8 decades, the tale centres around two sisters, Iris and Laura Chase and is told mostly from Iris’s perspective. The story opens with 25 year old Laura’s suicide and unfolds through an elderly Iris’s memories reaching back to childhood, various news articles and even a novel-within-the novel. All this sounds like it should be confusing, but Atwood never allows this multi-thread narrative to overwhelm what is essentially a novel about remorse, guilt and family secrets that have far-reaching consequences.
This has a little of something that will appeal to nearly everyone – romance, mystery, tragedy even science fiction. My selecting this novel just days before joining this book challenge has also paid off with one of my favourite websites doing a free-for-all discussion of it which can be found here.
I highly recommend The Blind Assassin. I’ve given it one of the highest marks that I’ve ever given outside of the Harry Potter series 
; A-
