The Alchemist

Why This Book Won't Leave You Alone

Paulo Coelho wrote The Alchemist in two weeks. His Brazilian publisher dropped him after the first edition sold one copy in the opening week, and the same person came back six months later and bought a second copy out of pity or curiosity, which Coelho liked to point out was the entire commercial run. He was forty-one, broke, working with a publisher who told him the book was finished, and he kept writing anyway because the story he had just put on paper was about a shepherd who refuses to stop walking toward a treasure that nearly everyone in his life tells him is foolish to want. The parallel is on the nose, and Coelho enjoyed pointing it out for the rest of his life.

What happened next is the only part of the publishing story most people know. A second Brazilian house picked it up. Sales climbed in tiny jumps — three thousand, six thousand, ten thousand. An American tourist bought a copy in Rio, arranged a translation, and HarperCollins put the book in shop windows across the United States. Bill Clinton was photographed leaving the White House with a copy under his arm. Madonna told Vanity Fair it was the book of her life. Will Smith quoted it. The thing landed on the New York Times bestseller list and stayed there for more than three hundred weeks. By the time Coelho died, the book had been translated into more than eighty languages, which made him the most translated living author on the planet, with more than sixty-five million copies in print.

The reason this matters is that the book is structurally simple, philosophically unsubtle, and roughly two hundred pages long. Critics have pointed out, often correctly, that it reads like an extended motivational poster. The characters are thin. The plot borrows from a folktale Borges already adapted in nineteen thirty-five. The premise — that the universe rearranges itself to help you when you commit to your dream — sounds suspect the second you try to apply it to anyone working a double shift to feed their children. And yet it has outsold almost every other serious novel of the last forty years.