The Devil And Miss Prym is yet another beautiful offering to the world from the philosophical Paulo Coelho. Those who have read The Alchemist can definitely understand what I am talking about.
In a nutshell, the story deals with the question whether mankind is Good or Evil.And Coelho does well to give us an acceptable solution at the end of the story.
The story takes place in the imaginary village of Viscos where a mysterious stranger arrives as a tourist and tests the very nature of the people of Viscos-whether Good or Evil.He brings with him eleven gold bars and buries them in the vast mountainside of the village of Viscos.He takes the girl Chantal Prym (the Miss Prym in the title) and tells her to communicate a challenge he would like to make to the people of Viscos.He says that he would be happy to give the village of Viscos the eleven gold bars if only one of them had the courage to commit a murder and that too in the next seven days after which the stranger would leave the village forever.
Well, what pleasure does the stranger derive from the challenge?Coelho gives a nice flashback which justifies the stranger's challenge.
The flashback goes as follows...
The stranger is the head of a large arms manufacturing company.He is a good man and leads life happily with his wife and two children. One day he gets a call from a terrorist gang that his wife and children have been kidnapped by them and he will have to supply them the arms they list out if he wants his family to survive. The man being a courageous soul decides to call the police.
The police succeed in finding the terrorist gang and shoot them to death but not before the gang has managed to murder the man's family..
The stranger is the head of a large arms manufacturing company.He is a good man and leads life happily with his wife and two children. One day he gets a call from a terrorist gang that his wife and children have been kidnapped by them and he will have to supply them the arms they list out if he wants his family to survive. The man being a courageous soul decides to call the police.
The police succeed in finding the terrorist gang and shoot them to death but not before the gang has managed to murder the man's family..
So what the man wanted to know from life was that whether mankind was essentially evil enough to commit such kind of pointless excercises such as the terrorists murdering his family for no reason at all..
If the people of Viscos accepted his challenge and committed a murder they would confirm his belief that mankind was essentially evil and return happily to the place he came from..
But if they were noble enough not to commit such a crime he would return with a lump in his throat accepting that it was his fate and nothing else that led to the demise of his family and that people were still the manifestation of Good in this world...
Paulo Coelho has given his best ideas through the character of Miss Prym who happens to steal the show right through the story and more so at the very end..
If the people of Viscos accepted his challenge and committed a murder they would confirm his belief that mankind was essentially evil and return happily to the place he came from..
But if they were noble enough not to commit such a crime he would return with a lump in his throat accepting that it was his fate and nothing else that led to the demise of his family and that people were still the manifestation of Good in this world...
Paulo Coelho has given his best ideas through the character of Miss Prym who happens to steal the show right through the story and more so at the very end..
A MUST READ FOR ALL FANS OF PAULO COELHO AND ALSO FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE INTERESTED IN UNDERSTANDING THE MEANING OF LIFE!!
1 comment:
a clean and unbiased review.good work mate..carry on..
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