The Alchemist

Title: The Alchemist

Author: Paulo Coelho

Publisher: Harper Collins 2009 (First published: 1988 in Portuguese)

ISBN: 978-81-7223-498-0

Pages: 161

This book was recommended by many of my friends for a long time, but I couldn’t get on to a copy until now. It was also suggested that it contained elements of spirituality - as a kind of statutory warning - since they knew me well! Spending money on something which embraced spirituality in its hold is not something I am wont to do. So with much delight, I saw the book waiting for me in the returned-books table of the library. As a character in the novel says, “When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it”, somebody might have conspired to give the book to me by returning it around the time I visited the library!

Paulo Coelho is the world-renowned writer and holds the record for the best selling living author. The Alchemist was translated into 67 languages and several million copies were sold. When it was first published in 1988, only 900 copies were sold and the publisher decided not to reprint. It was after finding another larger publisher that it really took off and found a place for itself in the mansion of world literature. Coelho’s novels are filled with spirituality and magic. The Alchemist is an allegorical novel full of symbolic happenings, extrasensory perceptions and miracles.

The hero of the novel, a Spanish boy named Santiago (though his name is mentioned only once in the book) was a shepherd in Andalusia who had recurring dreams that he would find a treasure at the Pyramids in Egypt. This was confirmed by a woman gypsy and a soothsayer who demanded one-tenth of his sheep as a reward. He crossed over to Tangier where all his money was stolen by a thief. He manages to find employment in a glass-ware shop where he amasses a good fortune for its owner by his uncannily apt business propositions. Once he got enough money, he left the place along with an English alchemist practitioner to the oasis at Al Faiyum where he meets with a true Arab master alchemist. The master tests his apprentice and finds him to be worthwhile and takes him along on the trip to Pyramids, across the Sahara desert. Braving tribal fighters, they reach a coptic monastery near the Pyramids. The alchemist converts a piece of lead into gold and divided it into four portions, one he gave the boy, the second he kept to himself, the third given to the monk and the fourth to the monk to keep in safe custody for the boy should he need it. Upon seeing the pyramids, the boy decides to dig a suitable place where he had an omen but was interrupted by armed robbers. They took away all his belongings and thrashes him and the chief told him that he was indeed a fool to go on a long journey in search of a dream, while he himself has not followed up on a dream in which he found a treasure in a disused Spanish church with a sycamore tree growing in its sacristy. The boy immediately recognises it to be the church near he lived. He returns to Spain, claims the treasure and decides to be with his love, Fatima, a girl he met at Al Faiyum.

The book is easy to read, quite interesting, I must admit. But it little goes beyond the level of some of the self-help books. ‘If you want something, the entire universe conspires to help you achieve it’ is a good motto to keep going. The stress given on living ones destiny will no doubt encourage people to seek and find it. As evinced from the interview of Coelho with BeliefNet - an internet portal for multi-religious faith – given at the end of the book, the contents are highly appreciable for religiously and spiritually minded people who may be able to gather a lot of meanings to the seemingly inconsequential events narrated in the work. The simplicity of the language more than helps in its high pedestal of one of the world’s best selling titles.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star