I recently finished reading The Alchemist, by the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho (in an English translation by Alan B. Clarke from the original Portuguese). This book, first published in 1994, has enjoyed considerable popularity around the world. I probably would not have read the book if it had not been for a job change. Due to anticipated low enrollments in the English as a Second Language (ESL) program at the university where I had been teaching, I was not offered a contract for the coming academic year. Consequently, I was forced to look for a new job and ultimately found a job as a Language Arts teacher at a private middle school. In one of our classes I have been teaching, the students were required to read The Alchemist. Not having read the book before, I also was obligated to read it.
In The Alchemist, Coelho tells the story of Santiago, a shepherd boy in Andalusia in southern Spain. He dreams of a treasure hidden somewhere near the Pyramids in Egypt and embarks on a quest to find the treasure. In the course of his quest, he meets an unusual assortment of characters, including the alchemist of the title. For those not familiar with the term, an alchemist is someone practices alchemy, a pseudo-science which seeks to transmute base metals into gold, find a cure for all diseases, and discover a means of indefinitely extending human life. Alchemy was practiced in the Middle Ages but was eventually replaced by a more genuine form of science--chemistry. The alchemist in Coelho's story, who lives in the deserts of North Africa, in effect becomes Santiago's mentor, teaching him the secrets of the universe.
I had mixed feelings about the book. On the one hand, Coelho's story is in some ways quite original and features an interesting plot. On the other hand, I felt at times that the author was trying too hard to be "profound" and sometimes his train of thought was difficult to follow.
Another problem for me was the underlying philosophy of the book, which appears to be a strange mixture of Catholicism, Islam, monism (the idea that everything in the universe is really one thing), and pantheism (the idea that everything is God and God is everything). For example, when at one point in the story Santiago is asked to swear that he will obey the leader of a caravan through the desert, the boy "[swears] to Jesus Christ" (p. 74). However, later in the story, when he first meets the alchemist, Santiago tells him, "Allah [the name for God in Islam] taught me the language of the birds" (p. 114). Yet later in the story, when Santiago is challenged to turn himself somehow into the wind, he begins to pray. In the course of his prayer, he "reached through to the Soul of the World, and saw it was a part of the Soul of God. And he saw that the Soul of God was his own soul. And that he, a boy, could perform miracles" (p. 157).
In effect, Coelho is advocating a sort of syncretism, a mixture of various religious beliefs. However, those beliefs don't fit very logically together. Not only do Catholicism and Islam have conflicting views about the nature of God, but monism and pantheism are also not philosophically compatible with either Catholicism or Islam since these latter two hold that God created the universe and is separate from it, not identical to it.
In short, for me, to the extent that Coelho's goal is to express his philosophical/religious views through his story, he falls short of that goal because what he is advocating is not logically coherent. Therefore, I would not recommend The Alchemist to anyone unless he or she enjoys reading books that affect a certain pseudo-profundity.
Image of Paulo Coelho from Wikimedia Commons