Paperback, 197 pages
English language
Published April 25, 2006 by HarperOne.
"My Heart Is Afraid that it will have to suffer," the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky."Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams."Every few decades a book is published that changes the lives of its readers forever. The Alchemist is such a book. With over a million and a half copies sold around the world, The Alchemist has already established itself as a modern classic, universally admired. Paulo Coelho's charming fable, now available in English for the first time, will enchant and inspire an even wider audience of readers for generations to come.The Alchemist is the magical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure as extravagant as any ever found. …
"My Heart Is Afraid that it will have to suffer," the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky."Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams."Every few decades a book is published that changes the lives of its readers forever. The Alchemist is such a book. With over a million and a half copies sold around the world, The Alchemist has already established itself as a modern classic, universally admired. Paulo Coelho's charming fable, now available in English for the first time, will enchant and inspire an even wider audience of readers for generations to come.The Alchemist is the magical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure as extravagant as any ever found. From his home in Spain he journeys to the markets of Tangiers and across the Egyptian desert to a fateful encounter with the alchemist.The story of the treasures Santiago finds along the way teaches us, as only a few stories have done, about the essential wisdom of listening to our hearts, learning to read the omens strewn along life's path, and, above all, following our dreams.
As a parable this felt a little over-idealized and preachy to me, while the part of my brain that craves this kind of story gobbled it right up. No harm done, and possibly some inspiration despite my skepticism.
At its core, a fantasy, pseudo-spiritual book about a shepherd deciding to follow his dream.
It got me hooked because I'm into middle easterner stories. It has some valuable (abstract) life lessons that are worth restating and remembering. The most important one for me: follow your dream fully, without being afraid of the failure.
Only no-s0-good part of the book: some of the concepts were really thrown in my face (e.g. favourability).
Overall, a short, easy-to-read story about life. I really liked it.
Recently, I'd seen the title making the rounds (as it had apparently doing for years) as a fiction-cum-self-help book. I figured I'd give it a shot.
This is a short, feel-good book written in a style that recalls the straight-ahead prose of certain Murakami passages (perhaps a result of the translation?) and nearly every paragraph contains a nugget of pithy wisdom from the mind or mouth of a character that could be picked up as a mantra for readers looking for that sort of thing. There's a vague, pan-deist spiritual undercurrent here that comforted the characters, and, I assume, some readers. That said, I couldn't get a grasp on the layout of the book as allegorical, or even find evidence of an overarching conceit, which made me skeptical of each philosophical point. Did Coelho intend to write a book full of enough sloganeering mystics that something thrown at the proverbial …
Recently, I'd seen the title making the rounds (as it had apparently doing for years) as a fiction-cum-self-help book. I figured I'd give it a shot.
This is a short, feel-good book written in a style that recalls the straight-ahead prose of certain Murakami passages (perhaps a result of the translation?) and nearly every paragraph contains a nugget of pithy wisdom from the mind or mouth of a character that could be picked up as a mantra for readers looking for that sort of thing. There's a vague, pan-deist spiritual undercurrent here that comforted the characters, and, I assume, some readers. That said, I couldn't get a grasp on the layout of the book as allegorical, or even find evidence of an overarching conceit, which made me skeptical of each philosophical point. Did Coelho intend to write a book full of enough sloganeering mystics that something thrown at the proverbial wall of the reader's cerebral cortex would "stick"?
Perhaps if I wasn't reading it with so much intention, predicated on others' recommendations (expecting, as it were, some amount of sage advice to be dispensed within its couple hundred pages), I would have let myself enjoy it more readily. But, as it stands, I simply found it a decent, quick read.
HAHAHA no.
