The Power Of One
(Bryce Courtenay)
When we read a work of fiction, often we are looking for more than escape. We are looking for validation. In the pages of a good novel we take a ride on a train that promises to take uson a ride that promises to make you feel ok to be who you are, in a world that increasingly expects its inhabitants to do the same things that everybody else is doing. four walls, concrete and corporations. Welcome to planet Earth.
If what I have described is a disease (surely it is), then a book like The Power of One might just be the cure that you are looking for. Set in Africa mid last century, it is the story of Peekay, an English boy alone among Afrikaaners. He is alone and for all intents and purposes the world is out to get him. His class mates jump on the Nazi bandwagon and view young Peekay much as Hitler saw the Jews. He is tortured, urinated on, beaten and mentally scarred, until the reader is certain that at least by the end of the book Peekay will die a tragic death.
Yet he survives. He becomes the smartest kid at his school, and does the homework of his ignorant torturers. He becomes the toughest, able to perfect 8 and 12 punch combinations that had previously been untested dreams to his teachers and coach.
By the end of the book he is well on his way to university, the hard way, via a scholarship. Far from being dead he is taught coil of muscle and fitness. Most of his persecuters have died.
The validation is this: In a world where the individual is slowly becoming obsolete, where even the most eccentric among us are feeling that we are just mere cogs in the corporate machine, the best stories and most enduring people have done it their way. They are the Peekays of the world whom have had to fight just for the right to be themselves, and once gained the right have the satisfaction of thanking very few and spurning very many.
This is the luxury, if we are to honest that we all really want. And may you find it, through The Power of One.
David Andrews
Resumos Relacionados
- Don't Give It Away
- Lines In The Sand
- Matilda
- The Time Machine
- Avalon High
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