With tens of millions of copies sold in over 80 languages, The Alchemist may not need my praise. This reading is either my third or fourth time. I thought it would be a good selection for my book club, and I’m looking forward to our discussion next week. It’s clearly written and may seem like simple writing, but it has so many ideas, thoughts, and phrases throughout the work. Terms like ‘Personal Legend,’ ‘The Soul of the World,’ ‘Universal Language,’ and utilized. The work features themes of destiny, drive, love, passion, and ambition throughout. I’m going to attempt not to give spoilers. Once you read it, you know the basic plot and the ending. But on rereading it, maybe once a decade, you get so many more life lessons to learn or relearn.
Without trying to spoil it, the basic premise is that the main character, the boy from Spain, has a dream of something he wants to attain. Then he goes through ordeals and setbacks along the way in his pursuit of achieving his goal. Early on in the book, he meets a glass merchant in Africa who has settled into a comfortable life. The glass merchant’s goal as a muslim was to take the pilgrimage to Mecca. But he was older, set in his ways, and may never make that journey.
The whole idea of whether the boy attains his dream and what people want in life is a powerful one. When people are young, everyone has a dream. But not everyone has the ambition to go through the hoops and tribulations to achieve their goals. As people grow up, they often settle into a career, a family, or a way of living. The positive message of this novel is that everyone can, in some way, achieve their own ambitions with enough discipline, practice, patience, and help from others.
When the boy meets and works for the merchant, he stays for a year. At specific points, he lost sight of his goal and worked hard to help the merchant make his shop successful. By learning a trade and excelling at it, he became a stronger person overall, and that experience ultimately benefited him later.
At one point in the desert, someone tells the boy how to survive the desert. One must focus only on the present. Not paying attention could get one killed. Another gem of philosophy is the use of time. People who dwell on the past can become stuck and never move forward. People focused on the future will bring more heartbreak at every failure, and so forth. The last two sentences I just made up. The reader can interpret these little nuances in a variety of ways, or with the reader’s own little take on it.
The novel does have some magical elements that are purely fiction, but those do not detract from the little truths spread out on every page. Paulo Coelho must have done a lot of research and crafted this masterpiece carefully.
I could go on, but it’s Saturday and this is enough for a blog post. Anyway, if you haven’t already read The Alchemist, do so. And if you haven’t read in years, it’s worth a reread even if you remember the basic storyline.
