The Alchemist

On reading The Alchemist, or "Du liest Paulo Coelho? Vergiss die Peitsche nicht!"

(spoilers ahead, not that it should matter since you'll know everything simply by reading the blurb on the back cover anyway)

Short version of this review: The Alchemist is crap. Through and through.

Slightly longer version: The Alchemist is crap for several reasons. Because there's no plot to speak of - everything zips along on a trail straighter than Fred Phelps' public persona; it does exactly what it says on the tin with no twists, no surprises and nothing to grab your interest, and everything turns out exactly as you'd think it would 10 pages in. Because the characters are a series of identical cut-outs saying the exact same things in the exact same show more voices over and over again. Because the prose jumps back and forth from purple to something that would be better suited for a children's book, full of repetitions and redundancies. Because it's a ridiculously conservative piece of pseudo-pop-philosophy that's only slightly dumbed down from your average Ricki Lake monologue and... OK, imagine if Candide had been perfectly serious. If Voltaire had thought irony was just a colour, like goldy only greyer. Then add some new-age nonsense to Pangloss' teachings, get rid of the gorier bits and you'd have The Alchemist: a book so unaware of its own shallowness that people were already parodying it 250 years ago.

The book is about this sheep herder. His name is initially given as Santiago but rarely ever mentioned after that, he's just referred to as "the boy," presumably since Coelho has watched that Simpsons episode where a greedy self-help guru tells Springfield to "be like the boy" (except he must have missed the second part of that episode where the advice predictably leads to disaster). This "boy" is certainly no Bart Simpson, though; for one thing, he must at the very least be in his late teens. For another Bart's not a blithering idiot like Santiago, or "Thicko" as I'll call him from now on. Thicko has to have everything explained to him at least four times, since even though he's supposedly been to seminary school and reads obsessively, the simplest words and concepts make him go "huh? Whassatmean?" Of course, the real reason for this is that Coelho is supremely uninterested in telling a story; his one purpose in writing is to impart Wisdom on his readers, and since he obviously considers his readers about as lucid as Thicko's sheep (there's a slightly disturbing Also Sprach Zarathustra undertone to this) he's going to have to be as literal and anvilicious as he possibly can. At one point, the Alchemist points out that this kind of wisdom can only be imparted orally - and since he's very obviously an authorial self-insert on a scale I've never seen outside of Erich von Däniken novels, you have to wonder why Coelho bothered writing the book. Maybe he got sick of people laughing at him when he tried to peddle this pap face-to-face.

So anyway, Thicko has this dream in which he finds a treasure at the Pyramids. This dream confuses him, but two Mysterious Strangers (one of whom we are explicitly told comes straight out of the Bible - subtle storytelling there, Paulie) tell him that this dream means he's going to find a treasure at the Pyramids. Thicko is highly impressed by their dream-interpretation skills and promptly sells his sheep and hitches a ride to Tanger, where he loses everything and ends up working for a living. He immediately forgets about his treasure, but after he's made enough money, he suddenly remembers it again and joins a caravan across the desert where he learns to accept that things happen because they are written and that nobody can change what is written - cue up the soundtrack from Lawrence of Arabia, since that's the only way you'll get the slightest sense that any of this is real. Finally, he meets up with the Alchemist of the book's title, who turns out to be... Yoda. Yoda with better grammar and a worse script, but still Yoda, right down to the big test where Thicko has to lift his spaceship out of the bog... uh, I mean turn himself into a gust of wind. Yoda teaches him to use the force, that we are all one and that there is no "try" only "do" and "do not," and Thicko sees the light. Except without the part where the beautiful Arab girl with whom Thicko fell in love at first sight (and she with him, since women in this story are nothing but rewards for male heroes) turns out to be his long-lost twin sister; a pity, since this is the sort of novel where even incest would have been an improvement.

The blurb on the back says that the book is "a magical fable about learning to listen to your heart, read the omens strewn along life's path, and above all follow your dreams." Fine. Problem is, that's ALL it's about and it says it both literally and repeatedly, again and again and again until it finally sinks in for poor Thicko: "Hey, I think I'm starting to get this! You're saying I should... uh... listen to my heart, read the omens strewn along life's path and... follow my dreams?" THANK YOU, CAPTAIN OBVIOUS. (No wonder Julia Roberts loved the book so much her endorsement is printed TWICE on the last few pages - the whole thing is based around the chorus to a Roxette ballad, just like Pretty Woman! Gee, I wonder what life-changing morals Coelho's other novels have in store - "If you want to know what love is, ask someone to show you"? "Dance cheek-to-cheek with ladies in red"? "Love lifts you up where you belong"? "Do anything for love (but don't do that)"? "Listen to the winds of change"? ...wait, that last one is already in The Alchemist.) The only thing the 180 wide-spaced pages of narrative add to the blurb is a profound sense of boredom, probably laced with some anger if you've actually shelled out cash for this twaddle. Every single character except for the one who's even dafter than Thicko keeps telling him the same things, every single character and every single thing that happens serves only one purpose: to convince Thicko to read the blurb on the back of his own novel until he gets it and is rewarded - in cash, of course. No wonder rich celebs like it; Madonna must have gone "Hey! He's right, I deserve to be rich!" when she read it.

I'm not even going to try to pick apart Coelho's "philosophical" and "spiritual" meanderings, which seem to consist of 50% random lifts from various religious writings and 50% hospital greeting cards. If you're the kind of person who thinks "today is the first day of the rest of your life" is a deep, thought-provoking comment on the nature of humanity, then you'll love The Alchemist. According to Coelho we're living in the best of all possible worlds, so never aspire to be more than what God has dictated for you, always follow the traditional ways, and remember that the only value of other people existing is that they can help you realise this. It's a remarkable mix of selfishness and fatalism and I'm honestly confused as to whether the writer even realises this or if he just mixed and matched from some 1-dollar book of aphorisms without thinking about it.

Alchemy is the art of turning base things into gold (and Coelho honestly seems to believe in it, even if no sane person has for the last few hundred years), but Coelho is no Midas; the only thing The Alchemist manages to prove is the old saying about polishing a turd. No matter how many stars and quotes from stars you stick on the cover, I'd suggest not sticking your fingers into it. show less

When I was 13 I freakin LOVED this book. It was one of the most inspirational and mystifying things I'd ever read. I still remember the chills it gave me and how fascinated I was for days after I'd finished it.

But I'm not 13 anymore.

Recently I made an attempt to re-read it, in a need to feel again those intense emotions of puberty.
I litteraly couldn't stop laughing. After a while I became angry at how pointless it was and realising how naive I was I almost felt embarassed.

So if you plan on reading this book, here's a tip: READ IT WHILE YOU'RE IN PUBERTY!!!!
Puberty is like a drug. Your hormones are on crack and the need to be different and to be inspired is so intense that blinds your judgment. So read it while you still can. It will show more be a wonderful experience.

Now, if you're an adult, well....tough luck.


I only rated it with 3 stars because once upon a time I loved this book, and sadly, I cannot erase all those feelings. show less

This was a really great story that could have been a perfect book. The characters, the settings, the plot itself: all of these were done well and reminded me, at times, of what it was like to read and enjoy a book as a child.

It's fitting, however, that the prologue begins with a re-telling of the myth of Narcissus, because the author has a serious problem with narcissism, imagining that everything in life is very much concerned to bring about his own personal desires (and your!). One wonders how anyone can be so ignorant of the overwhelming evidence against this sort of trite cheerleading to be found in the experience of the vast majority of humanity throughout time; perhaps the starving orphan in the impoverished nation merely needed show more to believe a little more in himself and in the beneficent regard of the universe?

The optimistic naivete could be excused if it only pervaded the work invisibly, but the author constantly pounds out simplistic banalities that anyone could contradict who's lived more than a year or two in the real world. Privileged middle-class readers pursuing their bourgeoisie dreams oblivious to the amount of help they've had will enjoy a self-congratulatory smugness as they pretend their already-gilded lives have anything in common with the leaden beginnings of a poor shepherd boy that are transmuted by faith and good works into a golden conclusion. Those who worship, without knowledge, at the altar of ambition will enjoy the denigration of contentment throughout the story. Optimism always denigrates contentment and ironically makes those who believe it less happy than they falsely imagine so-called pessimists (realists) to be.

All that said, the story as a story really is quite good. It could have been on of the tales from the Thousand and One Nights. In fact, stripped of all the digressions into philosophastering, the straightforward narrative might actually have served much better to promote the author's philosophies. But then that is usually the case; Keats said "We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us," that is we can tell when a writer is only interested in making us agree with him about some dogma or other.

True, stripped to mere narrative and presented as a sort of myth, the story would not have been so easy to use a banner for the author's brand of prosperity gospel--it would have been. as all good myths are, capable of bearing more than one truth--but then it would have been all the more valuable. One almost feels Coelho should have seen himself in the shepherd boy who traveled for years from Andalusia to the pyramids only to discover the treasure he had sought was to be found in his more humble beginnings. show less

TL;DR: Pseudo-deep nonsense, full of magical thinking, pretending to profundity that isn't there. New Age gobbledygook. Feelgood nonsense. As insightful as a horoscope. Filed under "hate-reads" and "shiterature".

This book is an exasperating mess of magic thinking and pretentious deepities. Coelho immerses his readers in feel-good poeticality: he likes it when something can be made to sound deep and wise, hinting at vast reaches of self-actualisation that the boogeyman of daily drudgery makes inaccessible to us. He will probably introduce a wise and mystical character -- though only one at a time -- to put it in a one-liner.

The Alchemist is the kind of book in which the New Age versions of Christianity, Islam, Dream Interpretation, show more Alchemy and Generic Spirituality are all true, and, properly considered, they're all the same thing. People who truly, madly, deeply "follow their heart" and are really really serious about seeking out their spiritual purpose in life (their "Personal Legend") understand this; they become so attuned to the Universe that they see that "all is one". And because at that point everything is so much in harmony, the Universe itself cannot but conspire to fulfil their dreams. Everyone else is probably too inhibited or scared to make that leap. (There is a great deal of patronising head-shaking at such folk.)

To make that muddled lack of thinking even more wishful, everything that can be learned is a "language", too: the way sheep behave is a "language": wordless, but comprehensible nonetheless, if only you find the right perspective. Reading between the lines of what people say and understanding unspoken assumptions and desires is another such wordless language. So is the way a caravan travels across the desert, and even the way the desert just keeps existing. Even the ecological pyramid of a balanced ecosystem (a small number of top-level predators supported by increasingly large numbers of prey) can be properly appreciated as mutual affinity and love, a finely calibrated "language" to be understood. You do have to have reached the proper profundity of thought, though (more pitiful head-shaking at the inhibited masses). Fortunately, in fine, all such languages really boil down to Love, as of course they do: Love, a.k.a. The Soul of the World. Even more fortunately, all this wordless meaning you can be attuned to is substantially the same thing as that christian/islamic/spiritual muddle I mentioned earlier, but you've got to be alchemist-level profound to understand that. And while anyone could arrive at that position -- we all already know this, deep down; it’s just been repressed and buried and whatnot -- most people won’t. Sad.

The vehicle that Coelho has chosen to deliver this murky mess is an almost allegorical fable. An Andalusian shepherd boy has a recurring dream of finding a Treasure in the pyramids at Giza and sets out to find it. Along his "quest" he first learns the “language" of his flock of sheep; then a mythical thousands-of-years-old biblical king appears to him and promptly cons him out of his sheep (but it’s for his own good, to teach him a zen lesson or something). He also meets an Islamic crystal shop owner, an English alchemist-in-training, the love of his life, and the famed Alchemist himself, all of who lead the boy, knowingly or not, towards deeper and deeper insights through an accumulation of "languages", and an incremental attunement to "omens". He keeps having visions that show him futures that can be changed and that warn him of danger. Towards the end, the boy has become so enlightened that he is able to have conversations -- in words! -- with his heart, the desert, the wind, the sun and god himself . The whole thing is too silly for words and collapses under its own pretension.

Look, this was never going to appeal to me: other works by Coelho’s that I’ve read, an extensive list of quotes from this book over at GoodReads and a thorough browse through the reviews here at LT told me exactly what kind of drivel this was going to be. I simply have no patience with pseudo-deep nonsense. At least now I can say that I’ve actually read the book, all the way through, and I am justified in never reading anything by Coelho again. show less

The Alchemist is a strange read, it gave me warm and fuzzy feelings but the intricacies of the plot are somewhat forgettable. This magic-realist, modern fable (as read by Jeremy Irons in the audiobook) is strangely soporific and gentle, although as a didactic tale it is somewhat lacking in that I have failed to put my finger on exactly what the moral message is.
It feels much older than a novel written in 1988, with overtones of religiosity, fatalism and simplicity. Although I suspect something has been lost in translation, and I am sure I have missed subtle context clues familiar to the Brazilian audience.
This is a Marmite book- ultimately polarising, but very accessible and designed to be a comfort read with a cup of tea on a sunny show more day. Some people will find it inspiring and some will find it patronising. I found it both in equal measures delightful and inconsequential. The cucumber sandwich and Earl Grey tea of afternoon reads. show less

Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who's on his way to see a girl he once met and fell a little in love with. Before he gets there, however, some stuff happens that I can only vaguely recall. Something about a fortune teller, who tells him that a dream he had about the pyramids in Egypt will lead him to a great treasure. A mysterious man who turns out to be something more convinces Santiago to abandon his ordinary and comfortable life as a shepherd and begin his quest - the pursuit of his Personal Legend.

I'm making a conscious effort to get through more books in my collection that I figure I'll probably be okay with either selling or donating when I'm done. This seemed like a good candidate - I picked up a copy ages ago at a show more conference, and while it seemed vaguely interesting, it wasn't the sort of thing I'd normally read. When I saw that my library owned the audiobook version via Overdrive, I figured that'd be the perfect way to get through it. I'd listen to it, use my paper copy to help me with any name spellings or other details in my review, and then offload it.

Audiobook was probably the best way to go. Jeremy Irons' voice was wonderful to listen to and made the four hours of listening time almost bearable.

That said, I hated this book. Hated it. Had it actually been a fantasy adventure about a boy on a quest for treasure, I might have liked it a bit more, but in reality this was more a self-help book in story form.

Its basic message was this: if you listen to your heart, follow your dreams, and go after your goals with everything you've got, there's nothing you can't accomplish. The entire universe will assist you. The only thing that can stop you is fear of failure.

It's a cruel message. It says "If you're not managing to succeed at this thing you're trying so hard to accomplish, it means that the problem is you. You're somehow still not doing enough, not trying enough, not wanting it enough." It's such an insidious lie, and it made me angry that Coelho had chosen to build an entire world around it.

Santiago really could accomplish anything he wanted to, just by putting his whole heart and soul into his quest. Any other boy might have starved to death after selling all his sheep to go after a treasure he'd seen in a dream, but not Santiago. Every experience he had and every person he met was just another lesson or sign that would lead him to his ultimate goal, his Personal Legend. Thieves left him penniless and theoretically hungry, but he was never truly in danger of starving as long as he kept his goal in sight. At one point he was beaten, but the pain might as well have been a light bruising for all the attention Santiago paid it. Everything always came back to his stupid Personal Legend, the only thing that seemed to leave any sort of lasting impact on him, except maybe Fatima. But more on Fatima later.

In the real world, a person can put everything they have into their goal, pursue their dreams with all their heart and soul, do everything right...and still not succeed. This is not an indicator that they didn't work hard enough or want their dream badly enough, as The Alchemist would suggest. Maybe they didn't have a rich friend or family member who could give them an interest-free loan. Maybe they got sick and suddenly had their health and medical bills to worry about. Maybe they had a family to support and didn't want to be complete jerks towards their loved ones (families didn't seem to factor into this whole Personal Legend thing at all - basically, if they really loved you and supported you, they'd take care of themselves until you accomplished your Personal Legend).

Which brings me back to Fatima, the young woman of the desert Santiago fell in love with (no relation to the young woman he was initially kind of in love with but utterly forgot later on). Her Personal Legend, if I remember correctly, was Santiago. All she had to do was wait in the desert for him. That's it. Why did Santiago's Personal Legend involve a multi-year quest that he had to actively participate in, while Fatima's just required her to exist and be pretty and unmarried? And then, when Santiago left to pursue his Personal Legend, she had to sit and patiently wait for him to come back, however long that might take. They had only spoken a few times and definitely weren't married, so she was basically just waiting for a near-stranger. It was Coelho's version of a soulmate romance. Man, I wish I'd been reading an actual soulmate romance novel rather than this book.

All in all, I don't recommend this, not even with Jeremy Irons' wonderful narration.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.) show less

Full review here: https://thebeerthrillers.com/2024/04/23/book-review-the-alchemist-paulo-coelho/
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Excerpt:
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In my view, Paulo Coelho’s writing suffers from a simplistic style and an over – reliance on platitudes that lack depth and originality. While his prose is undeniably accessible, it often falls short of the literary finesse and complexity that I believe are essential for great writing. Coelho’s narratives are frequently filled with trite aphorisms and banal observations that are presented as profound wisdom. For me, his characters often feel like mere vessels for these aphorisms, lacking the necessary depth and development to truly engage on a meaningful level. This superficiality makes his show more stories resemble self-help manuals more than novels, which diminishes their literary value in my eyes.

Furthermore, I find Coelho’s themes, although universally appealing, to be overly simplistic and reductive. His deterministic notions, such as the idea that the universe conspires to help individuals achieve their desires, come across as a form of magical thinking that ignores the real complexities and hardships of life. While this kind of storytelling can be comforting, it often feels detached from the nuanced and realistic explorations of human experience that I look for in literature. Coelho’s tendency to wrap his narratives in mysticism and spirituality without substantive exploration further diminishes his standing as a serious literary figure in my perspective. Although his books have found a large audience, the lack of intellectual rigor and literary depth in his work leaves him, in my opinion, outside the ranks of truly great writers.............
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Read More here: https://thebeerthrillers.com/2024/04/23/book-review-the-alchemist-paulo-coelho/ show less