The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho — “My Review”
About the book
The Alchemist is a novel by Brazilian author Paulo Coelho which was first published in 1988. Today, it’s sold over 65 million copies. It’s spent more than 315 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. And the book also holds the Guinness World Record for the most translated book by a living author.
Genre: Fantasy & Adventure fiction
Original language- Portuguese
Interesting Fact — It only took Paulo Coelho 2 weeks to write the original Portuguese version of The Alchemist.
Plot
The novel tells the tale of Santiago, a boy who has a dream and the courage to follow it. After listening to “the signs” the boy ventures in his personal, journey of exploration and self-discovery, searching for a hidden treasure located near the pyramids in Egypt. In his journey, Santiago sees the greatness of the world, and meets all kinds of exciting people like kings and Alchemists. However, by the end of the novel, he discovers that “treasure lies where your heart belongs”, and that the treasure was the journey itself, the discoveries he made, and the wisdom he acquired.
My Thoughts
We can learn a lot of things from “The Alchemist”. This book is all about perusing your dreams and doing whatever it takes. This might sound easy but actually it so difficult to do that there are very few people in this world who actually do it, I mean risk it all, just to follow your heart and your dreams…
It is so beautifully explained in the book that when you follow your dreams by putting all of your efforts and energy then “entire universe conspires in helping you to achieve it”. Here it is referred to as “beginners luck” and we all have been witness to this beginners luck at one or other point in our lives. Also, the author talks about a stage in our lives towards realizing our dreams, where nothing goes as per the plan and when everything start's working against us and it almost takes us to the brink of abandoning everything and we start loosing hope, but this is actually the time when we are tested for one last time and it also means that we are really close to our goal. The way it was explained in the book was simple yet beautiful. We often tend to forget simple things in our life like “the darkest hour of the night is just before the dawn”. It is actually true that so many of us just leave the struggle when it gets really tough and the chips are really low, whereas actually we were so close to achieving our goal, if only we would have had a little more patience we would have been there. So always remember that “patience is the key to success”.
Favorite quotes from the book
“And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”
“The simple things are also the most extraordinary things, and only the wise can see them.”
“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.”
Key Takeaway
Follow Your Dream and always remember “Nothing worth having ever comes easy.”
