The alchemist: a fable about following your dream

✍ Scribed by Paulo Coelho; Alan R. Clarke

• Book ID: 100058016
• Publisher: HarperSanFrancisco;HarperCollins Publishers
• Year: 2006;2013
• Tongue: UND
• Weight: 66 KB
• Edition: Special anniversary edition
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 0007529481

✦ Synopsis

EDITORIAL REVIEW:

Like the one-time bestseller Jonathan Livingston Seagull, The Alchemist presents a simple fable, based on simple truths and places it in a highly unique situation. And though we may sniff a bestselling formula, it is certainly not a new one: even the ancient tribal storytellers knew that this is the most successful method of entertaining an audience while slipping in a lesson or two. Brazilian storyteller Paulo Coehlo introduces Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who one night dreams of a distant treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. And so he's off: leaving Spain to literally follow his dream.

Along the way he meets many spiritual messengers, who come in  unassuming forms such as a camel driver and a well-read Englishman. In  one of the Englishman's books, Santiago first learns about the  alchemists--men who believed that if a metal were heated for many  years, it would free itself of all its individual properties, and what  was left would be the "Soul of the World." Of course he does  eventually meet an alchemist, and the ensuing student-teacher  relationship clarifies much of the boy's misguided agenda, while also  emboldening him to stay true to his dreams. "My heart is afraid that  it will have to suffer," the boy confides to the alchemist one night  as they look up at a moonless night. 

"Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the  suffering itself," the alchemist replies. "And that no heart has ever  suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of  the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity."  *--Gail Hudson*