Wednesday, September 13, 2006

The Alchemist


The ninety and nine are with dreams, content but the hope of the world made new, is the hundredth man who is grimly bent on making those dreams come true.
Edgar Allan Poe

Little need be said about The Alchemist as a work of literature because it hardly comes up to the task. Its power of persuasion, however, cannot be argued with considering it went on to find itself in the top 15 of all time best-sellers ever and made Paulo Coelho (The Devil and Ms. Prym, Veronika decides to die) a household name, not to mention, a lot of money.

Well then. What’s the book about? It’s about following your dream and seeing a vision all the way through, abstinence from which, is bound to be unsettling and make one unhappy. The book is full of such new age mysticism and folk-lore wisdom, which is quite easy to read through but hard to take seriously.

Santiago is a young Andalusian shepherd who has repeating dreams plague him and who decides to literally follow his dream. He consults a gypsy woman, a dream analyst of sorts, who directs him to North Africa on a quest for treasures and self-discovery. Here, far from his family and home, Santiago comes across several mystical figures and sticks around with them to see his destiny through. The story has a lot of allusions to the ‘Soul of the world’ and how the universe itself wants us to be happy and realize our own personal legend.

This book has, like I mentioned before, sold loads of copies and is widely quoted. This is somewhat sad. The very idea of millions and millions of people herded into a copy of this best-seller goes on to say that reading habits of the world at large are still juvenile and they only want irrelevant texts to tell them irrelevant stuff. If I had a penny for every time some dumb celebrity has said that this book was their absolute favourite book ever, I could buy the goddamn ‘Soul of the World’. The language of the book is rather simple because Paulo Coelho was originally targeting simple-minded people who have no grasp of reality. It is for the same reason that the book is full of ersatz philosophy and religious balderdash. I think of Paulo Coelho as the Britney Spears of literature because both of them have little talent, both use the same themes repeatedly and both state the obvious, and the only end-users who cannot see this obviousness are obviously a tad on the slow side.

I am not one who doesn’t believe in fulfilling dreams and all that jazz, but to fulfil your dream by telling others to fulfil theirs is like telling ghost stories to a ghost. It would give me little satisfaction. I have come across a lot of best-sellers that made me go green in awe but The Alchemist is not one of them despite its massive popularity. The book is perfect for a child because all the motivational stuff is bound to help set it up for the futility of the future but for an adult, the book doesn’t offer much and comes across as vain. And if you think I’m part of the conspiring universe to take you away from your destiny of reading this book…I have a finger here that is behaving rather odd.


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