FICTION
The Winner Stands Alone, by Paulo Coelho, $25.99
Paulo Coelho deplores glitz and glamour even as he devotes more than 300 pages of his new novel to evoking glitz and glamour in all its distasteful excess. His subject here is the Cannes Film Festival, which, in his opinion, stands on very shaky moral ground.
“In Cannes,” an assistant remarks, “there’s no such thing as friends, only self-interest. There are no human beings, just crazy machines who mow down everything in their path in order to get where they want or else end up plowing into a lamppost.”
Coelho disapproves mightily of the human folly on display in Cannes: the unbridled ambition, the thirst for fame, the lure of haut couture and ostentatious jewelry. He hates dark glasses, because “in a celebrity town like Cannes, (they) are synonymous with status,” and he loathes cellphones, which are “leading the world into a state of utter madness.”
Coelho posits a small group of people whom he dubs the “superclass,” who have all the power, all the limos, all the private jets; those who dress in high fashion (the fashion world is one of his principal bugaboos), swill champagne and get regular injections of Botox.
But he isn’t fond of ordinary people either, who do silly things like wear neckties or eat three meals a day whether they’re hungry or not. In short, while he compares Cannes to Sodom and Gomorrah, he’s not prepared to let sinners of any social class off the hook.
Igor, a psychotic Russian phone executive with his own private jet, comes to the film festival in pursuit of his ex-wife, Ewa, who has run off with Hamid, an Arab clothes designer also with his own private jet. Igor aims to kill a few people and notify Ewa on her cellphone, hoping this will motivate her to return to him.
Over a period of about 24 hours, he manages to suffocate a young street vendor and off an important movie distributor using a needle soaked in curare, which Igor blows through a cocktail straw. He spends the afternoon stabbing an independent film director and leaving a hermetically sealed envelope filled with hydrogen cyanide under an unknown person’s door.
Yes, we do live in a sinful world where all is vanity. I’d be a fool to disagree; it would be like coming out in support of processed cheese or puppy mills. But note that at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008 Harvey Weinstein bought the rights to Coelho’s best-selling “The Alchemist” and will be producing it with a budget of $60 million. I imagine that Coelho was around there somewhere in that modern Sodom, probably wearing dark glasses because it gets pretty bright at the beach, maybe even talking into a cellphone.
By Dennis Drabelle
Washington Post Writers Group
NONFICTION
Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don’t Play Baseball, by Jennifer Ring, $24.95
Throwing “like a girl” is an age-old taunt, and Jennifer Ring has had enough of it. Setting out to examine the “forces that try to keep . . . girls who want to play baseball away from the game,” the political science professor cites her own history: Until about age 9, she was often one of the first kids on her street to be picked when they got together to play.
She was known as “the neighborhood slugger who could also pitch.” Then suddenly the boys joined Little League teams, and the pitching slugger couldn’t get to first base. She goes on to criticize Ken Burns’ documentary “Baseball” for virtually ignoring women, despite the fact that they played organized baseball, sometimes on mixed teams, in the 19th century and that they have “attempted to gain access to America’s diamonds for as long as baseball has been played here.”
Twentieth-century baseball, she points out, evolved into a ritualized confirmation of the power structure, as well as a way for a boy to allay anxiety about his masculinity. White boys and men played together, males of color played separately, and females played the rather different game of softball.
At the root of it all, Ring argues, was the notion that “it is an utter disgrace for a boy to be ‘girly,’ or feminine in any way, and that diminishes the value of being a girl at all.”
Near the end of a book that makes its case forcefully and without academic jargon, Ring cites a former female professional player’s prediction that women will eventually be accepted as baseball players in the United States, though the pattern will probably be for girls to play with boys “when they’re young and in their own leagues when they reach adolescence.”
In the meantime, Ring chides the U.S. media for paying so little attention to girls’ and women’s sports, noting that at the 2006 Women’s Baseball World Cup, where her daughter played for the U.S. team, “the Japanese team had a television crew traveling with them, and the tournament was covered live on Taiwanese television,” whereas in the United States the tournament did not receive national attention.
