The Legend of Bagger Vance - book review

[alobear]

The Legend of Bagger Vance by Steven Pressfield is not really a story, so much as it is philosophy masqerading as fiction.  It's very zen, presenting golf as a metaphor for the journey to enlightenment, with the mysterious and very spiritual Bagger Vance instructing the characters in the different ways to discover their Authentic Swing.

As such, it very much made me think of Coelho's Alchemist, which had even less of a story and even sketchier characters, and did nothing for me at all.

To begin with, Bagger Vance himself, along with the sceptical viewpoint of the ten-year-old narrator, kept me interested and invested the tale with enough actual character to suggest it might have more to it than pretentious waffle.

However, as it went along, it got more and more like Coelho, until I started to find it actually unreadable.

"This was the holiness of sport: that it opened a pathway via the body to the spirit."

Not my kind of thing at all, I'm afraid.  I skimmed the second half to see if it had any kind of interesting concluding point, but I don't think it would have made any sense if I'd read it properly.

Moving on...

Comments

[prunesquallormd.livejournal.com]

I suspect your mistake was in reading a book that was, even superficially, about golf.
I mean, honestly. There are many, many rubbish sports that involve putting balls in holes, but thats got to be up there as one of the most rubbish :p