The Alchemist
by Paulo Coelho
Summary
Santiago, a young Andalusian shepherd content with his flock and his freedom to wander, is unsettled by a recurring dream of treasure buried near the Egyptian pyramids, and after an old man who claims to be a king named Melchizedek urges him to pursue what he calls his Personal Legend, Santiago sells his sheep and sets out across the Strait of Gibraltar into Tangier. Robbed almost immediately of everything he owns, he spends nearly a year working for a crystal merchant, rebuilding the man's failing shop and his own resources before joining a caravan crossing the Sahara toward Egypt. At an oasis along the way he falls in love with Fatima, a woman who agrees to marry him only once he completes his journey, and he falls in with an alchemist who teaches him to listen to the desert, the wind, and his own heart as sources of a wisdom no book can supply. Nearing the pyramids at last, Santiago is robbed a second time, and his attackers, in an irony the novel builds its entire ending around, mention a recurring dream of their own about treasure buried under a ruined church, in a country far away, beside a sycamore tree, the exact church where Santiago's own journey began. He returns home, digs beneath that tree, finds the treasure that had been near him the whole time, and sets off again, this time to keep his promise to Fatima.
Coelho writes in simple, aphoristic sentences built for quotation as much as for narrative, and the novel reads very quickly, closer in form to a parable or a piece of extended scripture than to a conventional novel, a directness that has made individual lines from it, especially its claim that the universe conspires to help a person achieve what they truly want, some of the most widely repeated in contemporary self help writing.
Historical Context & Significance
Rocco published O Alquimista in Brazil in 1988, and the book sold poorly enough in its first run that Coelho's original publisher dropped him before a larger Brazilian house relaunched it and it slowly built a domestic readership; HarperCollins did not bring out an English translation until 1993, five years later. Coelho has said he wrote the entire novel in two weeks, describing it as a story that was already written in his soul and needed only to be set down.
No major literary prize marked its beginnings, and reviewers, including The New York Times, later described it as reading more like self help than literature even as its sales proved otherwise; it has since sold tens of millions of copies in more than sixty languages and has been cited as the most translated book by a living author.