Global Voices Online

Brazil: Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist

Wednesday, January 24th, 2007 @ 17:08 UTC

by David Sasaki

Countries:: Brazil
Topics:: Literature

“By all rights, Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist should have single-handedly delivered a knock-out blow to any popular conception that Latin American literature is ‘good' literature. The novel is, simply put, execrable tripe.” So begins Posthegemony's ranting review of what it terms Coelho's famous work of “anti-literature”. Still, Jon admits that “the Alchemist must do something for someone–perhaps even for 85 million someones.”

2 comments

Jon

Ranting? Heh, I could show you ranting… I thought I was rather restrained.

# 2007-01-24 at 20:21 pm

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Pingback: lyzazel » The Alchemist

[...] I didn’t quite love it. I mean, it was okay, but I expected something special from a bestseller like this. Well, it was somewhat too long (although it isn’t long at all compared to some other books) and too religious for me, although there are some good points made there. Rephrasing the main idea, “everybody should go for their dream”. Certainly, there is a hell lot of truth in it. I’m not sure if I needed a whole book to think about that. But yeah, many people need the nudge and the book should do it. There are also a lot of other ideas covered on the book, but I won’t just go into details now… [...]

# 2007-02-6 at 17:33 pm

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