The Alchemist Generation | Anu Lal

The name Paulo Coelho appeared in my world when I was a teenager. I was interested in reading and The Current Books Bulletin was a catalogue-cum-newsletter that we received regularly at the educational institution which my mother ran. It was in the form of a booklet, about thirty pages long. Every month, I remember waiting for this booklet; the attractive smell of newly printed paper, the many stories about new book arrivals and about authors. This booklet was one of the materials I found useful in satisfying my reading habit.

In Kerala, where I am from, the more exotic a writer’s name sounded, the more fans he accumulated, especially from the academia and the progressive reading public. I didn’t belong to either category then and so didn’t think much about the exotic-sounding name. I had seen his photograph in black and white, on the pages of the booklet. The Alchemist and The Pilgrimage were titles that entered my consciousness unconsciously. The black and white photograph I had seen and this man’s exotic name made me think of him as an unreachable, rather incongruous, modernist writer, the kind we read often about in Malayalam literary weeklies. The literary circles also seem to laud similar figures from Latin America. I also knew from reading the booklet that he was from Latin America. And anything from Latin America should be celebrated, how could this not be. How could anything bad come from Latin America? Marquez, Llosa, etc. Could Paulo Coelho be a coincidence?

Only later, I realised, I too loved Latin Americans and their literary tastes. However, there was a remarkable difference. The mainstream literary enthusiasts in Kerala adored the Gabria Garcia Marquez-style literary writers from Latin America. My taste was different. I went with others like Carlos Castaneda, Paulo Coelho, and the new age company. The closest I could get to the literary-style Latin American writers was Mario Vargas Llosa. But that company was short-lived. Now that it is established that my tryst with Paulo Coelho had to happen later in life, let us jump into the time zone where I first encountered him.

It was during my graduation that I first took one of his books in my hands. I borrowed a book once from Jawaharlal Nehru Public Library in Kannur. The book has since become a pivotal point in my life. It was The Fifth Mountain. Although I was reading it as a graduate student, my age was a bit higher. I had encountered a major hiatus in my early academic life. After my higher secondary education, I had joined for a Diploma in Electronics Engineering and decided to try out something I didn’t understand or enjoy. I had done it due to the general interest in the engineering subjects among my relatives and friends. To put it short, it was the trend and I also walked with the trend. Since everyone had high hopes about the course, I also thought it would be great and was confident in an unrealistic way that something nice would turn up at the end. Once I started doing the course, though, I realised the difference between false hope and real hope. It is false hope when we think the trouble would go away if we just close our eyes. It is real hope when we trust in God’s mercy and patiently wait for the outcome at the end of a hard working season. I followed the first way and the result was reprehensible, to say the least. I, who was the unsurpassed champion in my academics during school days, turned into a tumbling pillar of failure. Still, in a chivalrous move, I kept failing and still didn’t quit in the middle, hanging in there, like a brave knight, completing the Diploma in Electronics Engineering after three years, several papers yet to be qualified.

Apart from the great lesson on Hope, I had also learned that I had a serious interest in literature. So I took it as a reason to join BA in English Language and Literature. When an overaged person seeks admission for a course in which the admitants are often just 17 or 18 years of age, the colleges find it rather convenient to deny admission. So I was forced to take refuge in Distance Education. The Distance Education stream did not offer any regular classes, but only offered contact classes for each subject, once a year. A small private college was running classes for BA English and there I joined for my regular classes. It was located in Kannur city. My father helped me get a membership in a nearby public library, Jawaharlal Nehru Public Library, Kannur. That was the place and the time when I had my first encounter with Paulo Coelho.

The Fifth Mountain opened with a quote in the preface titled “Note from the Author”. The quote was from The Alchemist, Coelho’s most famous and influential work. I hadn’t read The Alchemist at the time. The quote struck me as a consolation. “And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”


The protagonist of the novel was Elijah, the Biblical character. The Biblical story was not familiar to me at the time. Elijah and the widow and all their ancient circumstances came alive as a fresh new story in front of me. Unlike a usual hero in a hero-centred novel, the hero of The Fifth Mountain was a coward. He was someone who lived in fear, not imagined fear, but actual fear. Elijah feared the ruler of the land, the queen of his country, her god and her people. Elijah thought that the queen would kill him and this scared him. He didn’t know where to go. The message that emerged from this novel was that it was completely normal to be scared of circumstances. Still, you have a chance, a second chance in life.

It didn’t take long for me to connect with this character. I was also afraid of my career, joining Bachelors in Literature, trying to rediscover a new life. For me, the identification was perfect. The Fifth Mountain was a mirror that reflected my own life. Every word in the book made sense to me. The English translation that I read was a good one since it had focused equally on the story as well as the language. To what degree the translation carried the essence of the original language is a debatable subject. However, for someone like me, who had no way of reading the text in its original language, the English version gave the feeling of reading the original text itself.

The vulnerability of Elijah was the bridge through which I walked across into Paulo Coelho’s world. It wasn’t perhaps his world entirely as much of it I constructed in my mind. It was a pivotal point in my life, as I realised that there are other people in the world who had the same thought process as I had. The author of The Fifth Mountain himself had similar experiences where he was forced to pursue a career he was not interested in, forced to forget his dream to become a writer. Then one day, he was fired from his successful job and had nothing else to do. Then he chose to “follow his heart”, to become a writer. I learned these phrases to vitalise my heart, phrases like “following the heart”, “have no fear of making mistakes”, “following dreams”, etc. My thought process shifted from a “failure in Diploma in Electronics Engineering” to “someone in search of his dreams.”

I read The Alchemist after two years. I was doing my post graduation. In its 36 years, the novel has created its unique fan following. Many who would otherwise despise the very act of reading were seen to take the book and get influenced by it. The Alchemist created motivational speakers, writers, poets and a new genre of motivational novels. Many read this novel as a parable of searching for success in life. Even the later editions have a subtitle that says it's a parable, as if to leave no ambiguity in the reading public, as if to make things more simple. Simplicity is at the core of the book. Rather than the usual literary language, the flowing lyrical lines of the novel attracted quite a lot of young minds to the very art of writing. Like many young writers, the book also gave me the courage to create stories using simple words and philosophical themes.

My early writings were imbued with Paulo Coelho and the wisdom that he shared through his novels. Follow your dreams. The road to success is to have no fear of making mistakes. These words carried a power that not just motivated me intellectually but also became a strong driving force to my actions. This was perhaps one of the numerous ways in which the text was read, as a ‘guide to good living’. The possibilities of reading were endless. When the author’s intention with the work is taken into account, the author’s own version or opinion about the text is considered, the text becomes limited in its scope. As Barthes would say, “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text.” Often, as a reader, my gaze shifted from the text to the author, not as an authority over the text but as an extension of the text, as the Alchemist himself. The author’s life mirrored the stories he wrote.

Even though, a creative work, this personal admiration to Paulo Coelho as a hero figure of the explosive youth, from the golden period of the New Age Thought, The Alchemist was considered a textbook for personal growth, like many other novels by the author. The Zahir, The Valkyries, Brida, The Witch of Portobello, etc became the epitomes of personal experiences of real people searching for a higher consciousness. The characters and the situations were taken as real people and events, mostly because Paulo has a tendency to talk about real people and real events on his social media, especially through Facebook and his website during that period. The novel Aleph, for example, was autobiographical, explicitly. However, as a fan, I was reading all his works considering all of them autobiographical.

I now look back into the same books that once fascinated me as a young adult, I find depths of meaning still unexplored and unconquered. There is more to The Fifth Mountain and in The Alchemist, there is more to be discovered yet. The more I think about The Alchemist, especially, as a parable of following one’s dream, the more I am convinced, informed and educated by my spiritual experiences that it holds more than just following a dream. I am sure that the coming generation of readers too will find Paulo Coelho and get excited and leave everything to search for their dreams, their true calling.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. "Death of the Author." Image-Music-Text, translated by Stephen Heath, Fontana Press, 1977, pp. 142-148.


Coelho, Paulo. The Alchemist. HarperOne, 1993.


Coelho, Paulo. The Pilgrimage. HarperOne, 1995.


Coelho, Paulo. The Fifth Mountain. HarperCollins, 1998.

About the Author

Anu Lal is an Indian English author of twelve books across genres such as the novel, short fiction, novella, novelette, and nonfiction. He has a masters degree in English literature from Kannur University.