The Brazilian was standing in a structure made of glass. On the table was the
golden plaque that his agent had given him, and as he read the numbers on it
he felt happy. Outside the distant mountains were covered in mist and sleet
began to fall.
What do the numbers mean, asked the journalist. “Translated into 62 languages,
how many contracts they signed, how many awards and how many copies sold,”
said the Brazilian. “Eighty-five million copies!” said the journalist. “That
was in December so that goes up higher now,” said the Brazilian. He laughed.
“Now we are 92 million, going to get 100 million hopefully by September.”
It is tempting to try to copy the style of Paulo Coelho because he is one of
the bestselling authors in the world. The Alchemist , the fable for
which he is best known and which he wrote in two weeks, has sold 30 million
copies since 1988. He hangs around bestseller lists throughout the affluent
Western world and in troubled societies where life is limited. His website,
on which he declares himself “the most influential author of the present
century”, attracts 400 e-mails a day from fans who tell him that he has
changed their lives. Yet he is ridiculed by literary critics from New York
to Iran and Israel, where his sales per capita are at their highest. His
writing is simplistic, the critics say, his spirituality flat-pack, his
mysticism popular.
Both Coelho’s success and the criticism he attracts beg only one question: why
does he sell so many books? The short answer is that he writes simple tales
in simple language about the quest for spiritual fulfilment, about personal
development. But there are many books on this subject, and few can match his
ability to engage with so many people in so many corners of the world.
We are in his farmhouse near the French Pyrenees and I ask if he set out to
find a bookselling formula. No, he says, his language as stark as the
English translation of his books, his delivery as colourful as you would
expect from one who grew up in Rio de Janeiro. “How could I! How could I!
This is the dream of every writer but you never think about it because it is
so impossible!”
This is a typical Coelho response because it is full of drama — yet he hasn’t
really said anything. I realise quickly that interviewing him in English
puts us both at a disadvantage. He searches for words and sometimes finds
the wrong one, and it’s obvious that he isn’t expressing himself as fluently
as he would in his native Portuguese. This is a considerable handicap for
someone accredited by his readers with infinite spiritual insight, but I
don’t speak Portuguese; I’m here now, so we’d better get on with it. I note
that the protagonist of The Witch of Portobello , his new book and
his twelfth, is a woman who has everything — love, a child, money — but who
is still dissatisfied. I start to suggest that this seems to stand for. . .
but I haven’t finished my question when Coelho takes over.
“Most of the people, I would say, if they don’t follow their dreams they’re
not very satisfied. But it’s very difficult to face this reality because as
time goes by, well, I have to relax, I have to settle down, I have to live a
life in the best possible way. That happen to me also when I was 38. I had
money, I had my wife, I had love, I had health, thanks God, and sure as not
satisfied.
“That’s why I took the journey to Santiago de Compostela and, er, I said well,
my dream is not this. My dream is to be a writer, so I have to stop
everything, burn my bridges and go for it. So to answer your question it
seems that even if you have everything, if you’re not fulfilling something
that you want to do, you have nothing. I think it’s a good thing. William
Blake said a cistern contains, a fountain overflows. I think that if you are
satisfied then life loses its meaning. It’s part of human nature to search
for the unknown, otherwise you get stuck in the Stone Age.”
There you have Paulo Coelho, this is how he talks, these are the fundamental
notions that exercise him and that he writes about. It’s not intellectual
thinking, and whether or not you regard it as spiritual depends on your
definition of spirituality — you may just see it as common sense. Either way
it is universal, and while much of Coelho’s observations are rooted in his
Catholicism, he is nothing if not adept at making generalisations so broad
that anyone could relate to them.
So when he writes, he strips away and strips away at the words until he has
only the bones of his story and his themes left, and that is his book: easy
to read, compelling and seeming to promise some big fat revelation that, in
the three I have read, never comes — though clearly many readers would
disagree. Perhaps I’m unreceptive to the notion of magic and mystery,
perhaps I’m unsurprised by his themes — follow your dream, believe in
yourself, never give up, don’t be frightened of failure, and so on.
In The Alchemist a shepherd boy travels through the desert, seeking
treasure and eventually understanding that love is what matters. In The
Witch of Portobello, an orphan abandoned by a gypsy grows into a prophet
who suddenly disappears, leaving the people who knew her to solve the
mystery of her departure. “It’s about the human condition,” Coelho says.
He is a compact man with a little rat’s tail of hair that sprouts from the
hairline just below the bald patch at the back of his head. He is warm and
welcoming, and he is dominant and controlling, a macho man with a deep,
gravelly voice who decides when he will talk, when he will do pictures, and
who pours the water for the women — “That’s my job, we help women,” he says
when I try to pour some for him. He also decides when the photographer and I
will leave, which is an hour after our allotted time.
He is baffled by my failure either to smoke or to have more than one cup of
coffee, and he is keen for me to have a go at archery, which he practises
every day. He calls it a meditation that demands concentration and creates
stress as well as joy, but I suspect that he enjoys it because of the
regular manly challenge it provides. His reputation as a spiritual guru had
led me to expect a man who exuded calm and wisdom, but I am getting the
impression of someone who is restless and intensely driven and who has no
more answers than anyone else.
He has often said that he writes only about what he knows. He was born in 1947
and grew into a rebellious teenager who preferred street gangs, fighting,
car races and dating girls to following the rules that his engineer father
and housewife mother prescribed. Appalled at the example he was setting his
younger sister and cousins, and believing him to be psychotic, they took him
to a mental hospital. “My parents said ‘he does not behave like a normal
teenager’. I was a normal teenager! But not in this protected middle-class
environment. They took me to the hospital three times. The first time I
left, the second and third I escaped. But you get addicted to this, to be
mad. You have this small brotherhood where everybody understands everybody.
You live very comfortably. So I never saw this as a dramatic experience.
“[Being mad] it’s a kind of freedom. Yes, I’m mad so I can do whatever I
want.” Was he mad? “No. I think I was much more radical. I drop out of
school. Rebellion is in my nature. I go to extremes. Always. If the spirit
of Blake was here today he says the road of excesses leads to the palace of
wisdom. I’m not sure I got into the palace of wisdom but I’m following the
road of excesses up to today.”
I’m not sure I buy this. His home is modest and it is clear that when he is
not travelling (mainly to publicise his books) he leads a quiet life. But he
has certainly lived through many extremes. He became a hippy, took lots of
drugs and had lots of sex. Later, he became a successful lyric writer in
Brazil, and discovered the hard way that the military junta was suspicious
of bohemian tendencies when it arrested him three times, imprisoned and
tortured him. He spent the next seven years in a proper job (as the artistic
director of CBS record company in Brazil) and feeling scared. Then came the
realisation that convention didn’t suit him, and in 1982 he divorced,
married Christina, his fourth and current wife, and started to travel. The
walk to Santiago de Compostela led to his first book, The Pilgrimage, and he
has written a book every two years since. This takes discipline, I imagine.
“This is what was good about my school. I studied in a Jesuit school, hate it,
but they say discipline and discipline. And after my hippy period I say I
need discipline. If I have to write a book first I have to have the
discipline for not to write for nearly two years: control yourself, don’t
take notes, think, then there’s cleansing so that all the ideas that are not
really solid go away.”
Our conversation hops all over the place, from organised religion, which he
likes for its discipline and for the “collective adoration of a mystery”, to
the Iraq war, which he has always opposed. He tells me about an Irish reader
who turned up at his French home and announced that she was about to commit
suicide. He persuaded her to go for a long walk first, gave her his mobile
number; she walked and changed her mind. Despite this worrying encounter, he
says repeatedly that his joy comes from meeting people. “This is the most
interesting part of life itself and the fact that people know you, people
know your soul. They are open to you and you are to them. So wherever I go
from Kazakhstan to Manchester I have readers, we go to bars, I try to be as
open as I can.”
This is his recurring theme, his readers and how many of them there are, and
of course this is his response to the critics who, he says, tease him. It is
a strangely quantitative preoccupation for one so invested with the ability
to offer spiritual nourishment, but then dreams are just another word for
being achievement-orientated, and self-belief is another word for drive. Yet
while he is obviously immensely rich he is not materialistic — his home has
spectacular mountain views but is otherwise modest, just big enough for
himself, his wife and their maid (he never got around to having children)
and notable for its luscious decoration with his wife’s art — mostly hearts,
butterflies and religious references — and a lack of books. When he has
finished with them he gives them to the library, he explains — he does most
of his reading on the internet.
Why does he live here, in this traditional rural community that he calls
non-existent because it has no bakery? He likes the sense of calm in the
area and has always had fun there, it’s near Lourdes, but otherwise he
doesn’t know why, he says. He has one other home, a flat on Copacabana beach
in his native city, where he supports underprivileged children through a
charitable foundation. His other significant expenditure is to employ eight
people to answer his e-mails.
“How much do you need to live?” he asks with a shrug. In an attempt to
discover this, he and Christina spent two years in an hotel in the nearby
town where, coincidentally, I stay overnight. It costs €60 (£40) a night;
the manager tells me that Paulo, who is “ trãs sympathique
”, had a room with a balcony overlooking a small courtyard at the back.
What does Coelho search for now? “Well, I don’t need to write if I care only
about money — I could have stopped with The Alchemist. But I am
searching always for expressing myself, and that means anxiety. That means
pain. That means sleepless nights, but above all that means joy.
“I think there are some tricky values that society poses us. Like you should
be happy. OK, what is happiness? To live here with my wife, without
pollution, eating without herbicides, walking every day, writing books? No.
I’m a person who learns only through action. For example, I was in Rome for
a signing and a thousand people came. Everything happened beyond my
expectations and I have this joy of having this contact.”
Does that make you feel good? “Fantastic. That’s why you do something. That is
the meaning of life, I think.”
The Witch of Portobello, HarperCollins, £14.99 Buy
the book from Books First £7.59 including free delivery
Taking
part in our new book promo at WH Smith? Why not share your thoughts on
this book? Post your comments below
