Book Review-09-2020: The Prophet by Khalil Gibran #honestbookreviews #nospoilers

The Prophet

By

Khalil Gibran

A good book always leads you to a good book. I read, in the 5 AM Club that Khalil Gibran carried the manuscript of “The Prophet” for four long years and kept refining it constantly before giving it to his publisher, just so it was pure art. When he was interviewed by a journalist about his creative process, he said: “I wanted to be sure, very sure, that every word of it was the very best I had to offer.”

Surely, Khalil did not pay Robin Sharma to advertise his book like this. So, it was obvious that The Prophet was going to be my next book.

This book and its writing need to be savored slowly. One sip at a time. The Prophet speaks or I should say recites, about all the aspects of life as we know today. The topics discussed vary from love, sorrow, and joy to crime, punishment, and law. The idea that I decipher, after completing the book was to look at these everyday concepts from a different perspective that will simultaneously enlighten and lighten the mind. Once you read the prose and try to mix it with your understanding, you will find yourself leaning towards the author’s version but when I look at the world around me I am also scared that what the prophet teaches might be so impractical as the days go by in 2020. Will it work if I follow The Prophet's path, today? Is it relevant in this world? I will get trampled in this sea of sharks that we call the world we live in today. But then I realized that Khalil or the Prophet never made any promise to liberate me. He just wrote a book and it is up to the reader to decide. Not all books are a call to action. Some are there just to be savored, slowly.

The Prophet is a poetry, a collection of numerous proses. One may muse if it is inspired by Islam, Sufism, or the bloody history of Lebanon in the early 1900s that Khalil might have experienced in his time. If it was published in 1923 and Khalil kept the manuscript with himself for four years then the majority of this book was written during and just after World War One. A kind of Lotus blooming in dirt situation.

I frequently went to the dictionary for this one. Some words are just so much out of our normal usage, but when you get the meaning of those words and go through the prose again, you realize that this was the most apt word for this and no other modern word in the English language would have done justice to what the prophet wanted to transfer to his disciples.

Khalil became the third-highest selling poet after Shakespeare and Lao Tsu with The Prophet.

The book is only 107 pages but I must tell you that it is to be read slowly with a lot of deep moments to understand and reflect so it will take its own sweet time.

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