An Exercise in self flagellation. Review on The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho

Before embarking on the exercise of writing a review on a book like The Alchemist. I should confess that I am no fan of the self-help genre of books, despite the fact that it seems to be in thing to be reading these days. These books are almost always exceedingly puerile and one does not understand the rationale behind the creation of such works and its universal popularity. As a rule, these books state self evident truths which have been taught to people by parents from their childhood. The ponderous words of wisdom which according to the self help gurus have been discovered by them are timeless and as old as hills. To cut a long story short, these books have nothing new to say, they merely rehash old ideas and present it in a clichéd manner. Despite being imbibed with certain common values, it is puzzling to see people being crazy over such books and their fervent desire to improve themselves. One of the tired clichés which self-help authors trot out is the narration of a parable which meanders along like a river in spate, seeking convoluted means of narrating a moral which could have been explained with greater clarity in a few words.

The book, The Alchemist is written by Paulo Coelho who is a Brazilian by birth and has authored quite a lot of books of the metaphysical genre. The blurbs on this book say a book of great depth, wisdom, enlightenment and mystical meaning. A word of caution here-all the blurbs shamelessly promote the book despite the fact that the book contain a tremendous amount of nonsense, however they manage to hook you and make you part with your money in buying them. God forbid, if you actually do that in the hope that this book will enlighten you, your hopes will be dashed to the ground. I too picked up the book in the same hope but as I reached the end of the book, it dawned upon me that there would be a definite improvement in the condition of the reader-He would be poorer by 195 rupees and whatever enlightenment which dawned upon me after finishing the book can be summarized in a few words - stay away from such books in future.

Since I have taken the onerous and unpleasant task of reviewing the book, I have no desire to leave the reader in a lurch having come so far, it will be my endeavor to tell you the plot as much as I could make anything of it. The story is about a shepherd, Santiago who is definitely not a run of mill shepherd, he has great dreams in his life-to fulfill his destiny. It is not understood as to the reasons as to his unhappiness in being a shepherd. The only reason which strikes me as logical is that had he been happy, poor Coelho could not have finished his novel and earned pots of money as royalties. So Santiago who wants to search for his destiny has to go out to a faraway land. Apparently, one cannot search for his destiny in their hometown. It must be quite heartening for tour operators to hear this. Santiago undergoes a lot of hardship in realizing his destiny. So all you lazy fellows dont go searching for your destiny, it is a lot of hard work.

During the course of his travels, he meets a lot of fools like him spouting wisdom in riddles which no one but Santiago understands. It seems that shepherding involves quite a lot of intellectual energy which must be news to the readers. Santiago also dreams like all mystics do but his destiny somehow gets mixed up in the search for some treasure which teaches you the fundamental principle of life-you may search for whatever you want but ultimately it boils down to money.

At the end, Santiago finds his treasures which is no surprise considering the fact that have you ever read a book in which the hero does not find the treasure. Besides, this is a self help book, so if the hero cannot help himself, how can he teach you to help yourself. So he finds the treasure alright, but where he finds it is interesting but not surprising - right under his nose. Had the fool been more observant, we would have been spared the agony of reading the book. The writing by Coelho is quite laboured and read it only if you are a diehard fan of the author, others please don?t touch it with a barge pole.It completely surprises me that Paulo Coelho apparently has a cult following, to me it proves PT Barnum old wise saw, There is a sucker born every minute.