The Alchemist
‘The Zahir’, the subsequent book written by Paul Coelho, was read by me prior to The Alchemist. The Zahir generated interested in Paul Coelho and the Alchemist.
The story of Coelho’s own life is an unbelievable one, although he grew up in a middle-class family in Rio de Janeiro. The highlights include involvement in drugs, occult practices and black magic, arrest and torture by the Brazilian secret police and incarceration in a mental hospital intermittently for three years from the age of 17, at his parents request.
Why did his parents have him shut away? Because they wanted Paulo to become an engineer like his father, and they thought their son was mad to want instead to be a writer. He says he cried when he discovered years later that the hospital records described his strange symptoms as Always reading and Typing until two or three o clock in the morning. That would be enough to place many of us in the mental hospital at Agra.
Coelho s books are autobiographical, mythical retellings of his own story. The Pilgrimage describes Coelho s personal pilgrimage across northern Spain to the shrine of Santiago de Compostela. Apparently, pilgrims on this road today clutch this book as they make their way to the shrine.
The Alchemist is a fine book. I remember reading this book during my Metro journey to office and I used to curse the Metro rail for its speed as it took me to my office very fast. I’m a fast reader, it’s been quite a while since I’m engrossed enough to finish a book like this. Excellent presentation and worth the money. To all those who thinks the grass is greener on the other continent, they should read this book.
If you liked The Alchemist, you share that feeling with America s former President Bill Clinton, who read it because his daughter Chelsea insisted, then got himself photographed with the book because she wanted to promote it, then invited Coelho to dinner at the White House.
The moral of this story speaks of the ’’Soul of the World’’ and that the Earth itself wants us to be happy. This story tells how each of us have a single mission or goal in life, a Personal Legend, though most of us don’t realize it. But most importantly it speaks of how doing good deeds for others is eventually rewarded and though we don’t know what our treasure will be, or where and how we will receive it, if we do follow our heart, we will find it.
---- Pradeep Ratnaparkhi 14 Sep 05