Essays on The Alchemist

My path to literacy started, unlike most others. Reading stories is my hobby and habit from my early childhood. In my childhood when I was unable to read, I always liked to hear stories from my parents and grandfather. When I started my school, I always liked to buy story books. My home environment is also a literacy rich. This adds more interest to literacy in my personality. There is a small library in my house as reading books were a hobby of my grandfather too. When I was a child, I had no permission to enter this library. I always liked to ...

The book “The Alchemist” written by Paulo Coelho has drastically changed my attitude to the things around me and to my life as well. The history of the boy who obeyed his destiny and followed his dreams made me totally rethink the way I see my future and helped me to establish my dreams and goals. The event of Santiago’s life that had the greatest effect on me is the luck that he had brought to the merchant’s shop. From the very beginning of his work in the shop all his ideas resulted in a great success ...

The success of The Alchemist cannot be argued; in just ten years after it was publish it has sold more than 20 million copies and has been translated into over fifty-seven languages. This is a world record for number of translations by a living author. As the New York Times aptly puts it. “[This] Brazilian wizard makes books disappear from stores.” The author Pauho Coelho wrote a book that no only sold numerous copies, but sold them in numerous language and cultures. This success points to a massive of the appeal. The beautiful prose found within the novel can be at times simply ...

Every once in a while we feel that divine intervention is behind the incidence or occurrence of something that has come along in life. Whether it is a commercial, a person, a song or something else, we cannot help but pay attention because it reaches directly to our heart. For most readers, finding Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist makes them believe that it will be a nice, quick read that will provide a change of pace from the usual books that they read. However, Coelho’s novel turns out to be In The Alchemist, Coelho discusses the concept or idea of the destined path ...

Success presents an amorphous concept to many people. It is often difficult to describe with most people choosing to measure success by tangible features such as the number of cars or the amount of money one has. Others may view success as raising many children or achieving an inner sense of peace. Given the fact that there is no universal definition of success it is important to form a personal view of it lest one wastes time chasing another man’s version of success. In his book, “The Tipping Point”, Malcom Gladwell attempts to describe how successful people such as ...

One question that the world will perhaps never stop asking is “what is the meaning of our life?” Every philosopher in one way or another centers their career around answering this question. Is not literature and art just an attempt at either answering this question or of making the case for one possible answer? One common theme is that the answer is not a static turn of phrase, but one that is found through a journey that endeavors to understand. This essay analyzes how that question becomes answered through the journey’s of protagonists in four contemporary novels: Pauhlo Coelho’s “ ...

The Alchemist is an allegory novel that was written by Paulo Coelho and first published in 1988. This book was originally written in Portuguese but was later translated into 71 languages. The Alchemist is about an andalusian young shepherd boy called Santiago Santiago. It tells of Santiago’s journey through countries in search of his personal legend in order to satisfy his life. It also explains the hardships he encountered on his journey on the way and how he solves these problems. Santiago chose to be a shepherd because he loved travelling and he could only reach his goal and ...