A wonderful read about good and evil and basic human nature.

I spend a lot of my time reading and a book that grabbed my attention recently was “The Devil and Miss Prym” by Brazilian author, Paolo Coelho. I’d already read “The Alchemist” and thought this would be equally as good.

Coelho seems to be the only recognized Brazilian author in contemporary literature and I hope to find others since most of what he writes is parable or at least moral.

“The Devil and Miss Prym” is set in a small fictional, European village in the mountains in present day, but life in the village is very anachronistically stuck in the days before technology. A stranger comes to town and the old widow Berta notices as he walks past her house that he is accompanied by a devil. Berta was able to see the devil because ever since her husband died, he’d been hanging out just out of her sight on her left side. He’d told her to be on the lookout for the devil coming into the village, so she had been patiently waiting, examining the scenery from her front porch all those years.

Berta was the oldest woman in the village and Miss Prym was the youngest. At the devil’s prodding, the stranger approached Miss Prym with a proposition. He’d suffered unimaginable hurt at the hands of terrorists years earlier and he wanted to prove to himself that it was just a fluke that he’d been afflicted by evil people. His devil, on the other hand, was using this as an opportunity for a battle between good and evil in this village in such a way that it could began civilization’s downfall for miles around.

The book began with a long bit of narrative and very little action. Just as I began to think it was becoming too preachy, Coelho dialed it down and let the characters drive the rest of the plot for a much more satisfying story. I almost stopped reading this book just at the point where it became very interesting and it would have been my loss. Read this book, but be aware that there is a very large element of moralistic parable.