Soul pilgrim

In France, Australia, Spain, and Brazil, naturally, he has been a constant guest of the best seller lists. The US market has been a little harder to crack, but magus Paulo Coelho is getting there.

Bondo Wyszpolski

"It doesn't matter which nationality and language we speak. We share the same ideals, the same passions, the same quests." (Paulo Coelho)

Paulo Coelho owns the best seller list in Brazil. Really. A couple of months ago, if you'd have picked up the Folha de São Paulo (the biggest newspaper in Brazil, with more than one million copies), you'd have noticed four of Coelho's titles among the top ten fiction, and one title -- just to rub things in -- on the top ten non-fiction list. O Alquimista, in particular, has been like a starfish on a rock; for five years no one has been able to pry it off the charts, and in South America alone it has sold over two million copies.

Harper San Francisco has just released the paperback edition of O Alquimista, in English The Alchemist: A Fable About Following Your Dream (177 pp., $10), as well as Coelho's re-packaged first work, The Pilgrimage: A Contemporary Quest for Ancient Wisdom (226 pp., $12), which was originally published in this country (and in Brazil) as the Diary of a Magus. In September, The Valkyries: An Encounter with Angels will be hitting local bookstores.

These short and simply written works tend to combine spiritual and inspirational 'new age' ingredients with distinct fairy tale qualities, much like The Little Prince. They're 'feel good about yourself' books, but they're also charming, thoughtful, and easy to read.

Coelho has yet to become a big sensation in the States, but this success is nothing if not worldwide. The Alchemist has topped the best seller lists in France, Spain, and Australia, was recently published in Japan, has been optioned for film by Warner Brothers, and in September it will be released by a major publishing house in Italy. So, although he lives in Rio de Janeiro with his wife, Christina, Coelho has become, by necessity if not by choice, a globe trotter of the first order.

The three of us sat down together in Los Angeles recently as Coelho began an extensive US tour that will take him across the country and even into Canada. I'd met the Coelhos twice in 1993, when Paulo was here to talk about The Alchemist after it was first published in English, and so the following interview was not as impersonal as many interviews tend to be, especially with someone of international stature.

Paulo, I say, when you travel to all these different countries -- which you seem to do all the time -- do you ever have the chance to relax and just sight-see?

"There are moments, yes; and there are moments when it is impossible. Right now in the United States it will be impossible. I arrived on Saturday evening [we met Monday morning]. Yesterday I went to walk around and I knew that it would be my only free day during this tour. I tried to profit as much as I could."

Harper San Francisco's got him on a tight leash, all right. "My itinerary is that thick," Coelho says, indicating an imaginary portfolio about an inch deep. For example, minutes after our talk concluded he was appearing in France -- via satellite -- to receive a writing award.

Coelho grumbles a bit, but then who enjoys waking up at five o'clock to catch a plane?

Nonetheless, "This is very exciting," he states matter-of-factly; "This is a unique moment in my life and I try to live it with as much intensity as I can."

It's exciting, I say, but I'm sure that sometimes when you sit back and think about it, it must be very surreal, too?

Coelho acknowledges that the ramifications of his success are beyond his grasp. He says he does not dare to think about it or try to explain it, because "Either I'll be fearful or very proud, and these are very dangerous things. It's better to keep a distance. To be aware of things, but never to lose your innocence."

It's an important point, because we all know that fame can often exact a terrible price.

"The danger exists," Coelho admits. "I hope to keep my innocence intact. Of course I'm not dumb, I know that I'm a big business and there are those sides of business that I have to be very aware of. But up to now I think I have kept a naiveté."

In other words, he's not jaded yet.

What about the depletion of energy? Even popular rock'n'roll artists aren't on the road this long.

"I've been touring for almost two years. I started in 1993 with Australia, Argentina, Chile and the United States, and from that moment on I didn't stop." He did have two months to himself in Brazil last summer. "But this was all. I've been touring all over the world, all the time."

Apart from the energy it demands, it must also take away from your time to write?

Coelho agrees. "But you know, in Brazil we have a saying, 'When it needs to, the frog can jump.' The same thing goes for me. I thought at the beginning that I could only write in my office with my desktop computer, and then I discovered that this is not true, that I could do it wherever I am."

He illustrates this by saying that he'd once had the notion of going up to the mountains, sitting in front of a tranquil lake, and composing inspired prose. However, "I never, never could work like this," because the external stimulus is missing. He says he wrote his first four books in Brazil, "with the fax and the phone ringing, and my friends calling me; and then I can write a book. But if I go -- and I've tried this, of course -- to a fantasy landscape with mountains and loneliness and time to write, then I can do nothing. Nothing at all."

Which isn't all bad. Because when September rolls around, Coelho will be on the world-circuit once again: Italy, Japan, the Scandinavian countries, and probably back to the US to promote The Valkyries. "But, like the shepherd in The Alchemist," Coelho says, "I'm still on a constant pilgrimage through life."

If he seems a bit tired on the morning we meet, it's probably the jet lag (there's six hours difference between Rio and L.A.), but overall his spirits seem just fine: He's up and in for the long haul. "This is the only way that I have to contact my readers, to get in touch with people. This is the best thing about the job. You are never a foreigner, you are always there because your book was there before you and it shows people who you are. And then when you go there you have 'soulmates' to meet and to talk with." Your book is like a calling card, I tell him. Coelho laughs. "Exactly," he says.

"To see my book doing well in several different countries, it shows that there are things that we share, that we are the same. It doesn't matter which nationality and language we speak. We share the same ideals, the same passions, the same quests."

One reason for Coelho's international success may be that word-of-mouth occasionally transcends national borders, especially in Europe where one country's best seller list is carefully eyed by another. And sometimes international travelers will come back from a far-off land with tales of a particular book, thus arousing some interest in it before the translation has been completed.

When you travel the world, do people ever expect you to be a spokesman, not only for the books you write, but for other Brazilian writers who are not as well known?

"I don't think so, " Coelho replies, "Because to begin with my books are not typical Brazilian literature. Nonetheless, I hope I can open the door for Brazilian writers... In a certain way I've profited from the situation of Jorge Amado."

In the United States, Amado remains the best known Brazilian author -- and I like to think I've helped to sustain the momentum in some small way, having written about The War of the Saints for the Los Angeles Times -- but lesser known figures like Rubem Fonseca, Ignacio de Loyola Brandão, Moacyr Scliar, João Ubaldo Ribeiro, and the late Osman Lins -- are also worth reading.

"I'm a fan, I'm a groupie of Jorge Amado," Coelho admits, "because he's very, very important for us."

Not only that, Amado stood up for and defended Coelho against unfavorable and harsh criticism. "Even with these very tough reviews," he says, "I acquired an immense public that grows and grows. Today I've sold nearly four-and-a-half million copies of my books. This has never happened in Brazilian literature. I'm very proud of my country and my people, because I'm not one who had to go abroad to be recognized."

In your books there's sometimes a sense of the future, a glimpse of things to come.

"I believe neither in the importance of the future nor in the importance of the past, past lives and that; I don't believe this. I do believe in the present -- that we can change either the past or the future. Perhaps my characters foresee things, but they know that all these things are linked to the way that they were going to behave in the present. In any case, I think that the present is our gift. It is the most important part of our life and we can change any future that we have if we live the present intensely."

Coelho's remark reminds me of Octavio Paz, in particular his 1990 Nobel Lecture, published as In Search of the Present. As Paz writes, "The present is the source of presences."

Are your other books, or those you're planning to create, along the same lines as The Alchemist and The Pilgrimage?

"They are not the same," Coelho answers, "But I always focus on this message of 'Be faithful to your dream, and fight for your dream, and pay the price of your dream.' I always try to focus on this because this is my personal quest also.

"In my books, I'm very attentive to the signs." Indeed, there's an omen every few pages or so in both of his translated words, and woe to the one who ignores them. These signs don't always make logical sense, Coelho says, and we may have to rely mostly on our sixth sense, our intuition."

"This is important for us," he emphasizes, "To be aware of all the signs around. Even if they don't have logic they are most powerful."

As if on cue, several people enter the lobby where the three of us have been sitting alone. Although they are not literally ejecting us from the room, the sound of scraping chairs and shuffling feet clearly unbalances the equilibrium we've attained during the course of our hour long conversation. Christina, Paulo, and I smile and laugh and look at one another with knowing glances. This was a sign, all right. It was time to go.

Master of oneself

How Petrus shows the author and its readers the path to self enlightenment and reining in the moment.

Bondo Wyszpolski

The Pilgrimage, by Paulo Coelho, translated by Alan R. Clark ($12 paper, Harper San Francisco, 226 pp.)

"Even if I were not able to find my sword," writes Paulo Coelho, "The pilgrimage along the Road to Santiago was going to help me find myself."

The 700-kilometer trek between the French city of Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port and the Spanish cathedral of Santiago de Compostela was undertaken by the author several years ago, and became the inspiration for the first of his many books to be published in Brazil. Coelho's US publisher has re-released it to coincide with the paperback edition of The Alchemist, as well as to herald the impending hardcover publication of Valkyries: An Encounter with Angels.

Without going into the order of RAM, the magical sect in which Coelho aspires to become proficient, I'll simply say that the author's "adventure of traveling towards the unknown" is both literal and metaphysical, or physical and spiritual. As befitting any novice who seeks enlightenment, Coelho is assigned a guide: During the course of their few weeks together, Petrus shows the author several mental exercises to increase his self-mastery in different areas. The reader, too, is invited to use these formulas for personal enrichment.

The book's simplicity -- it has a soft, soothing, quiet tone --works well in its favor. The search, as fable-like searches tend to be, is open to everyone who is receptive, willing, and patient. The real goal, of course, is the journey itself: Mastering the present moment carries us to our heart's desire. It's a message that appears in The Alchemist as well.

Petrus, who is closer to Castañeda's Don Juan than to Dante's Virgil, tells the author that "When you are moving towards an objective, it is very important to pay attention to the road." Heed the signs, the omens, he says. We walk the road; later, the road walks us. This concept seems to echo Eugen Herrigel's Zen in the Art of Archery [with the archer 'becoming' the arrow], as well as Miyamoto Musashi's A Book of Five Rings.

Two other primary themes arise. One, we must fight the good fight; do not be deterred by fear from setting out to achieve what you desire. Two, follow your dreams (there's a well put inspirational pep-talk on pages 50-52). Coelho tells us that often people don't pursue their dreams because they wouldn't know what to do with them if they achieved them, and that many times people will stay with what they have, however detrimental, only because it's familiar to them.

The Pilgrimage -- chockfull of sagacious one-liners -- gently addresses these issues. I tend to prefer The Alchemist, and feel that The Pilgrimage is simply more of the same. My friend Kari, to whom I gave both books, red them back to back and says she prefers them equally. We did, however agree that they are uplifting and easy to digest, and will likely appeal to a wide audience.

The Alchemist, an excerpt:

That night, the boy slept deeply, and, when he awoke, his heart began to tell him things that came from the Soul of the World. It is said that all people who are happy have God within them. And that happiness could be found in a grain of sand from the desert, as the alchemist had said. Because a grain of sand is a moment of creation, and the universe has taken millions of years to create it. "Everyone on earth has a treasure that awaits him," his heart said. "We, people's hearts, seldom say much about those treasures, because people no longer want to go in search of them. We speak of them only to children. Later, we simply let life proceed, in its own direction, towards its own fate. But, unfortunately, very few follow the path laid out for them -- the path to their destinies, and to happiness. Most people see the world as a threatening place, and, because they do, the world turns out, indeed, to be a threatening place.

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