Well, readers, here we are: it’s finally time for a new book! (In this case, a very old new book; my copy is practically falling apart.) As planned, this next book is my long-postponed review of Robin Sharma’s ‘The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari’.

 

Background  

The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari is a book in the self-help meaning-of-life genre and was written in Canada back in the ’90s. I believe it was pretty big in North America, but that might for all I know just be the cover blurbs talking it up. I don’t recall it making any kind of splash in the UK, but it’s hard to tell because I don’t normally check out self-help sections; that said, I spend enough time in bookshops and libraries that I think at the very least it probably wasn’t put in massive front-of-shop displays (I think I’d have noticed the title). 

It is apparently (very) loosely based on the author’s own experience of giving up a legal career to go into the self-help industry. So that’s kind of meta. 

I discovered this particular copy when browsing a shelf of second-hand books in a small general store, and picked it up because it looked like something that might be worth a blog post. As I read the first few chapters I realised that I’d been wrong; this wasn’t worth a blog post, it was worth a full-on chapter-by-chapter booksnarking. This, as I’ve said, then got delayed for many years when two other booksnarking projects jumped the queue… but the time has finally come. 

I got several chapters into it (can’t remember how many) but then decided it would be better to leave the rest until the actual review so that I could report my reactions to it as I went along. This means that I still haven’t read most of the actual self-help bits, so for all I know they might turn out to be really good once I get there. We shall see! Anyway, this means that for the first few chapters I’ll be going over distantly familiar ground (‘distantly’ because it’s years since I read even the part that I did read), and after that I’ll be on unknown territory.

It seems to be quite a bit shorter than the last few books I’ve read, so I’m hoping I can get through it relatively quickly. Relatively. Maybe several months instead of several years? We can hope.

Aaaaand here we go! 

 

Chapter One: The Wake-Up Call 

He collapsed right in the middle of a packed courtroom. 

Well, apart from anything else, absolutely full marks for a gripping opener.  

The rest of this paragraph gives us some background info: the ‘he’ in question is a nationally-recognised top lawyer by the name of Julian Mantle who buys really expensive suits. Julian Mantle is now: 

 squirming on the ground like a helpless infant, shaking and shivering and sweating like a maniac. 

So, quick mention that words like ‘maniac’ are now known to be ablist slurs (because of a whole load of anti-mental-health prejudice that comes with them) but it’s also fair to note that Robin Sharma wouldn’t have realised this was an issue in 1999. 

Everyone freaks out. The bailiff starts doing CPR, which irked me because it doesn’t sound as though Julian had actually stopped breathing (since he was described just above as ‘squirming’) and so it’s not medically appropriate, but that’s just me and my annoying habit of actually knowing medical stuff. Meanwhile, we go into a flashback for the narrator to fill us in on some background: 

• Julian is a workaholic (‘willing to work eighteen-hour days for the success he believed was his destiny’ who also likes living it up (‘Late-night visits to the city’s finest restaurants with sexy young fashion models, or reckless driving escapades with the rowdy band of brokers he called his ‘demolition team’ became the stuff of legend at the firm’). These two descriptions sound somewhat contradictory to me, but maybe he alternates between the two ways of doing things. 
• He comes from money and success, and has plenty of both himself. We hear about ‘the three-thousand-dollar Italian suits that draped his well-fed frame’, his ‘Armani-clad shoulders’, ‘income in seven figures’, ‘spectacular mansion’, ‘private jet’, ‘summer home on a tropical island’, and, of course, the titular Ferrari. I’m guessing there’ll be a major theme coming up about material things not really mattering at all. (Which, to be fair, we can also deduce just from the title.) 
• The narrator is a lawyer at the same firm as Julian who was picked out by him as an intern to work on a ‘sensational’ case defending a wife-murderer, which Julian wins, although it’s hinted that Narrator (I don’t know whether we ever get his name, but I can’t see it in this chapter) thinks the accused was actually guilty. So, apparently Julian’s pre-change-of-heart backstory involves being the sort of lawyer that works for rich people to get them off the hook. Narrator was then invited to stay on as a lawyer, and did so.
• Julian is not the easiest person to work with, as he’s a ‘his way or the highway’ type who gets into ‘late night shouting matches’ with the narrator, and possibly other colleagues. However, we’re assured that he has a heart of gold underneath this, as evidenced by the fact that he always remembered to ask about Narrator’s wife and, more importantly, he helped Narrator out of a financial hole by arranging a financial scholarship for him.
• Although we’re told again that Julian ‘loved to have a wild time’ and also that he ‘never neglected his friends’, Sharma leans heavily into the workaholic narrative at this point, describing Julian (and, as a result, the narrator) as working longer and longer hours, with Julian taking on more and more cases and forever obsessing over not having prepared enough. This reads as if Sharma was trying to advise simultaneously against devoting yourself to work and devoting yourself to wild living, and didn’t realise (or maybe didn’t care) that it didn’t quite make sense to use one example for both narratives.
• Julian’s obsessed workaholic life (and the long restaurant meals he’s supposedly also finding time for) takes its toll: his marriage fails, he stops talking to his father, and at the age of 53 he looks to be ‘in his late seventies’. Ironically, this is also messing up his professional abilities: ‘Where he would once dazzle all those present with an eloquent and airtight closing argument, he now droned on for hours, rambling about obscure cases that had little or no bearing on the matter before the Court.’ (Sigh. When I first read this, my reaction was ‘so… wouldn’t people stop giving him important cases?’ and now it’s ‘so… he’s now qualified to be POTUS?’)
• He has some dreadful tragic backstory. Narrator knows this exists, but no-one will tell him what it is because they’re sworn to secrecy (though that apparently didn’t stop someone from letting slip the existence of said tragedy even though whoever-it-was did manage to keep shtum about the details).

And all that brings Narrator back to the events of the first paragraph, whereupon we learn that Julian’s medical issue was ‘a massive heart attack’. Really? From the description, I’d thought it was going to be epilepsy. (The description actually reminded me more of acute hypoglycaemia, but no way was that going to be the diagnosis in a non-medical book, and epilepsy would have fitted reasonably well.) I mean, I know this isn’t a medical book, but even pre-Internet it was fairly easy to find descriptions of how heart attacks present. Couldn’t Sharma have taken a few minutes at the library to look this up? Oh, well; from what I remember of the part of the book I did read, realism isn’t its strongest point.

Anyway, that’s the end of the first chapter, so we’re off to a good start here. This is definitely more readable than the last few books. As per my usual practice, I’ll link all further posts on this book back to this one when I post them.