The Alchemist
September 3rd, 2007
The Alchemist is a novel first published in ‘88 by Brazilian author Paulo Coelho. It deals with a Spanish shepherd boy who encounters a King who convinces him to leave behind a life he is comfortable with in order to seek a treasure.
The boy leaves his flock and Spain altogether, crossing into Africa without speaking a word of Arabic, gets robbed, finds a job, learns Arabic, and has many more adventures, encountering strange people from strange parts of the world like England. I won’t give away more than that of the plot.
Paulo Coelho has a clear writing style and shares his philosophy of life throughout the short novel. We learn about the differences and similarities between Christians, Muslims, and others. We learn of the brutalities of the desert and the strange ways of desert people. We also learn that if anyone tries to sell you a camel, tell that person where he can stick his camel. Buy a horse instead.
Not enough humor and too simple, I think a lot of people got a lot more out of it than I did. Still worth a few hours of your life reading. Personally, for Southern American authors, I like Isabelle Allende much better. Since this was a best-seller though, go ahead and read it just so you can have a conversation with your friend about it. 6 dead zombies. 
thanks for the review. i’ve heard of coelho but not read him before.
Hi there. Been busy all weekend long. I just thought I would pop in and say hi and tell you I will have a post tomorrow finally. LOL.. Great book review. Sounds like something hubby and I can read together. I mean I read and then he reads. I will have to write that name and book down. I will give just about anything a first chance.
Lime - It wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t as good as it was hyped up to be.
Tweety - I’ll hopefully have some time to drop by tomorrow night then.
Hey, Z!
Hate to be negative, but read this one after a friend told me it was one of her favorites. Basically, what C does, though is take bits and pieces out of stories from different religions, traditions, strips them of the contexts that give them meaning, and sugar coats the whole thing for mass market audiences. For instance, the sort of major twist at the end comes from an old Hasidic story (see Martin Buber’s ‘The Way of Man According to Hasidism’).
I don’t know. Just not into cheap spirituality (see Salinger’s Franny & Zooey).
Yonder - Yes, it was full of writing clichés and stuff I heard elsewhere. Agree with you about the cheap spirituality, like an updated version of Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet. That’s why I gave it a near mediocre rating (6). It’s still enjoyable and the author has a fluid writing style.
I just picked this up on Friday from Borders. Not sure when I’ll get to it, but it’s short, so it shouldn’t take me long once I get that far. I’m a little disappointed in your review because now I wish I hadn’t gotten it. Ah well. It’s probably better than some books I’ve read.
Hmm. There are too many books to choose from to be reading one that gets a review like that.
Kathleen - Well, I hope you like it. Just because I didn’t like it doesn’t mean it’s bad. It’s just, the book got hyped up so much and for me, it failed to live up to the hype.
Scott - I don’t have to be the only one who does book reviews, hint, hint.
i haven’t read the others but i really liked ‘the Alchemist’ because it was so simple and the msg was so clear and moreso he did have dozon of complecated charected that is so hard to remember by the time you turn to next page.
Recently i read this book called ‘the Secret’… the idea is basically what’s already been said by PC in this book ‘If you want something than the whole universe will conspire for you to get that thing’ or something like that.