Alchemist- Paulo Coelho

ALCHEMIST

The Alchemist  is an exciting novel by Coelho Paulo .It is the kind of novel that tells you that everything is possible as long as you really want it to happen. The novel is all about a shepherd boy Santiago he in turns searching for a treasure . The information about treasure is revealed to him by a dram. And he is following his dream to find the treasure. The novel appeals to everybody, because we can all identify our selves with Santiago: all of us have dreams, and are dying for somebody to tell us that they may come.

The book is a simple story of a simple shepherd boy who has a dream and the courage to follow it. The novel skillfully combines words of wisdom, philosophy, and simplicity of meaning and language, which makes it particularly readable and accounts for its bestselling status. The Alchemist follows the journey of a shepherd boy named Santiago. Santiago, believe that the dream to be  decides to travel to a i nearby town to discover its meaning. A gypsy woman tells him that there is a treasure in the pyramids of Egypt.

Early into his journey, he meets an old king, who tells him to sell his sheep to travel to Egypt and introduces the idea of a Personal Legend.Your Personal Legend is what you have always wanted to accomplish. Everyone, when they are young, knows what their Personal Legend is. He adds that when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it. This is the core theme of the book.

Along the way, Santiago meets an Englishman and continues his travel with him. They travel through the Sahara desert and during his journey, Santiago meets and falls in love with a beautiful Arabian woman named Fatima. He asks Fatima to marry him, but she says she will only marry him after he finds his treasures. He is perplexed by this, but later learns that true love will not stop one's Personal Legend, and if it does, it is not true love.

Santiago then encounters a lone alchemist who also teaches him about Personal Legends. He says that people want to find only the treasure of their Personal Legends but not the Personal Legend itself. Santiago feels unsure about himself as he listens to the alchemist's teachings. The alchemist states: Those who don't understand their Personal Legends will fail to comprehend its teachings. It is also stated that treasure is more worthy than gold.

The author believes that each one of us has a dream given to us by God and He gives us clues times again and again so that we recognize those clues and follow these dreams with great zeal. Each one of us has a destiny. To discover these destinies and then follow them is the purpose of our lives. Difficult will be the challenges of the unknown, but what is easy is not eternal, it's finite and the unknown is infinite.

The book is a simple story of a simple shepherd boy who has a dream and the courage to follow it. The novel skillfully combines words of wisdom, philosophy, and simplicity of meaning and language, which makes it particularly readable and accounts for its bestselling status. Perhaps this is the secret of Coelho's success: that he tells people what they want to hear, or rather that he tells them that what they wish for but never thought possible.
The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho is a book for those who have lost the dream or never had it. It's a book targeted to our world of lost wisdom; for a world in which temporary joy prevails pure joy. It is for the youth which has forgotten to question itself; for the middle-age men who in their busy day have forgotten their real identity and their dreams. It is a book for the people who are not in harmony with the self in them, because they don't follow the person they want to be but the person others want them to be. The book reveals us that always believe in the person you are. Always be the person you want to be and not the person that others want you to be and remember worth what you have because the treasure lies in you.

 By

Sandhya VS