The Alchemist by Paulo Cuelho

First published in Brazil in 1988; first publised in English translation in 1993.

The Alchemist is one of those books that I’ve heard about for years but never got around to reading. I was finally nudged to read it, as well as The Giver, when Aaron Rodgers recommended them during the book club segment of his Tuesday appearances on Pat McAfee's show.

The plot is simple. A boy named Santiago is a happy shepherd in Andalusia, leading his sheep from village to village, selling their wool and dreaming about a village girl he finds particularly attractive. Wondering if the girl is his destiny, he asks a Gypsy to tell his fortune. She tells him that he will find treasure and, in exchange for a tenth of the treasure, directs him to the pyramids in Egypt.

Santiago’s journey connects him with several people who offer advice about living. An old man who calls himself the King of Salem tells Santiago that the world’s greatest lie is that “at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate.” From the old man, Santiago learns the importance of discovering your Personal Legend and understanding that “whoever you are, or whatever it is that you do, when you really want something, it’s because that desire originated in the soul of the universe.” Personal Legends seem clear in youth, when we are not afraid to dream, but become cloudy as we age and begin to believe that our Personal Legend is unattainable.

Santiago travels to Africa, where he works for a time for a crystal merchant, meets a professor whose Personal Legend is the study of alchemy, and moves on to an oasis in the desert. There he falls in love with a desert woman and meets the alchemist the professor is trying to find. From the various people he encounters, and from the sand, the wind, and everything around him, he learns secrets of the universe. Those secrets can be derived, the alchemist tells him, from even a single grain of sand, because everything is connected to everything else, all originating in the soul of the universe.

At various points, Santiago believes he should abandon his quest for treasure, perhaps to return to Andalusia and his life as a shepherd, perhaps to stay in the oasis. At various points he suffers setbacks (thieves and tribal wars are particularly vexing), but always finds new omens because the universe will always help us achieve our Personal Legend if we know how to understand the messages it sends us.

The novel fits into the book club’s self-help theme. We often hear from famous people that if you just persevere, you too can attain your dream. Perseverance is important, but it also helps to have the traits that success demands. Perhaps, however, our Personal Legends are always built from the traits we know we have.

When he’s not throwing footballs, Rodgers talks about embracing the present, opening the mind to new people and experiences, and not being deterred by obstacles. Those lessons are central to The Alchemist.

Paulo Cuelho’s message resonates with an enormous number of people. It is one of the bestselling books in history. There are denser, more complex novels that explore the same lessons in greater depth, sometimes with greater realism (Santiago’s ability to turn himself into the wind, or at least to communicate with the wind, the sun, and the hand that made all, make the novel allegorical rather than realistic). Perhaps The Alchemist is valued for its simplicity and the directness with which Cuelho spells out the novel’s inspirational lessons. Read on a different level — the level that had greater appeal to me—the novel tells an engaging adventure story about a likable boy who arguably comes of age by pursuing his dreams. Self-help enthusiasts will probably want to put The Alchemist high on their reading lists, although I’m guessing that most readers in that camp will have discovered the novel long ago.

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