One of my ex-es was exigent enough to exact an excoriating review of this excruciating example of one of those execrably extolled excrescences of literature whose exceptional success extends beyond all reasonable expectations. Exerpted here's an extract of the review where I've excised all the plot-spoilers (for the benefit of those who're planning to read this in the near future).


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Ideas & Theme:

The book can be treated as an allegory. The several particulars of the book (treasure at the Pyramids, journey through the Sahara) are arbitrary and easily substituted with any reader’s personal experiences.

The title of the book evokes the goal of Mediaeval Alchemy: where the knowledge of transmutation of base into noble, was considered not just a material knowledge but a spiritual power.

The central idea of the book is to follow one’s destiny, to achieve one’s dream, however impractical and impossible it might seem at the outset. Santiago has a dream which he is goaded on to follow by several characters he meets: the biblical priest, the alchemist, the crystal-merchant, Fatima, even the camel-driver he meets in the caravan.

The book’s treatment of the concept of destiny leaves a lot to the imagination. In a mystical and hush-hush tone that is maintained throughout the book, the author encourages the reader to contemplate the horror of discovering too late in life that the time to set out in quest for one’s destiny has already passed.

The importance of following tradition in the desert tribesmen’s life is brought home through the incident of Santiago’s prediction of an attack on the Oasis via an apparently unrelated omen (one hawk in the desert sky attacking another). It was against tradition for anyone to attack an Oasis and hence Santiago was forced to bet on his life that his prediction would come true. However, this glorification of Tradition is summarily discarded later in the book when the Alchemist himself asks Santiago to drink wine despite the drinking of alcohol being prohibited in the Arab world.

The concept of God is more or less taken for granted by the author. Everybody in the book works under the assumption that a benevolent God exists and the holy scriptures of one’s religion of birth need to be followed. The protagonist is clearly and unquestioningly Christian. There are several references to the Bible sprinkled copiously throughout the book—the most obvious being Melchizedek, who actually appears in the Old Testament and offers bread and wine to Abraham in return for a tenth of his spoils of the war on Sodom and Gomorrah .

The Muslims in the Arab world are referred to time and again as “infidels”, perhaps in jest. Religious differences do not amount to events of any consequence as Santiago’s love for Fatima is blind to her being Muslim and vice-versa. There is no serious discussion or deconstruction of the concept of God or religion anywhere in the book. This is not surprising, because the author intends to make full use of the mystical smoke that religion fans up.

There is a chilling thread of fatalism that runs through the book reinstated every time by repetition of the Arabic term “maktub” which translates roughly to “it is written”. Coelho apparently demands of his readers an unquestioning belief in predestination. Towards the beginning of the book, when the “King of Salem” dismisses Santiago’s book as being about “the world’s greatest lie” (which is that one is at the mercy of one’s Fate) there is a whiff of Melchizedek playing Devil’s advocate to further convince the reader to surrender any misgivings regarding Fatalism, but he disappoints by ending up doing exactly the opposite. It is not made clear to the reader how one can “choose one’s destiny” and yet doggedly follow one’s predestined dream.


Impressions:

The story has a mostly linear timeline with brief flashbacks into the past when Santiago remembers his village and how he came to be a shepherd, and is narrated in the third person all along maintaining a fable-like tone.

The author uses the literary devices of repetition consistently throughout the book. Santiago finds himself repeating the aphorisms that wise characters have uttered earlier in the book. It is another matter that the aphorisms are mostly clichés and end up serving as mere comforting noises to lull the unthinking reader into an acquiescent mood.

The end of the book is decidedly bizarre with Santiago first holding surreal conversations with the desert, the Sun and God himself (in the “Language of the World” of course).

Even the final realization of the much raved-about destiny leaves the reader slightly cheated. One would expect a less literal interpretation to the word “treasure” after all the flowery events leading up to the grand finale.


Conclusion:

History tells us that the alchemists of Europe became divided into two groups. To cite Encarta, "One group was composed of those who earnestly devoted themselves to the scientific discovery of new compounds and reactions; these scientists were the legitimate ancestors of modern chemistry as ushered in by the work of the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier. The other group took up the visionary, metaphysical side of the older alchemy and developed it into a practice based on imposture, necromancy, and fraud, from which the prevailing notion of alchemy is derived. "

It's not difficult to see to which group Coelho's Alchemist belongs. This book is not for the modern scientific mind which holds a deep distrust in mystical gobbledygook glorifying destiny, superstition and similar concepts.

“The Alchemist” is, expressly, a simple fable, written to be readable and understandable to one and all. It relies on preachy dogmatic mantras and the tradition of religious literature to use miraculous co-incidences to make unlikely events in the plot fall into place. Considering how popular religion is, it is not surprising that this book has remained in best-seller lists for a long time.

Verse has not been a very popular way of reaching out to the novel-readership out there for more a century. Poetry daunts most of us, especially when it’s set to rhyme and meter, one almost involuntarily hunts for annotations and/or anecdotes periodically to retrieve what allusions are assumed to have slipped through the sieve of lay reader’s well-holed literary background.

But Vikram Seth keeps it simple. Without winging too much into surrealism, nor showing off Classical knowledge of legend or myth, he makes his verse accessible to the less than semi-erudite and yet manages to enthral the wannabe erudite among us. His analogies are transparent, his little learned jokes far from Nabokovian. And in the one place he uses an abstruse French borrowing (“petrissage”), he unabashedly footnotes its meaning on that very page, heedless of the hisses he might incur from more sophisticated quarters.

The plot is simple enough: its flow mostly linear with a generous dose each of comedy, irony, tragedy and romance. In dealing with the lives of yuppies, it has almost all the major Californian lifestyles covered in well-rounded 3D characters: John, the lonely hunky geek; his Stanford bud Phil Weiss, an ex-geek converted to socially responsible environmental activism and father to a motherless son; their mutual friend Janet Hayakawa, the sculptor-musician daughter of Nisei; Ed, a young Christian tennis-player coming to terms with his budding gayness; Liz, a blonde lawyer with pacifist leanings and a family in the Californian wines business.

Between these, all viable romantic connections are made (John, Liz; Phil, Ed; Liz, Phil, and thence John, Janet). The gaps in the plot are masterfully filled with events and emotions precipitated by the more ancillary participants: children (John’s son), pets (Liz’s cat Charlemagne rejects John, and later so does Liz), neighbours and siblings (John & Phil are reunited at Liz’s sister’s concert).

The air of the novel is balmy, yet cool: the synecdochical Golden Gate standing for the much-hyped Californian sunny lifestyle of the young and the beautiful. Like the steady humour, the constant undercurrent of angst and pathos is controlled and subtle, right until it erupts into a dramatic car crash at the end, fatal to one of the central characters. That apart, there are no moments of high pathos aimed at making the more sensitive reader wriggle in pain; neither are there any deliriously belly-huggingly laughable parts. The overall tone is serene and easy-going.

All said, the book could have easily lapsed into the ranks of the predictable if it were not for timely twists in the tale that make Liz chose Sense over Sensibility (Phil over John), and allows a neighbour to laugh outright with warm understanding at a newly orphaned child with two fractured arms. The issue of Environmental responsibility & pacifism is dealt surprisingly with a homily coming from a priest.

This very social book seems almost ready-made fodder for a TV adaptation. It is, hopefully, just a matter of time before some enterprising producer cinematises or serialises this delightful and quirky book into a sure-fire romantic tragicomic hit.

Chomsky says the apparatus for language learning is built-in into a human brain and is independent of its owner's ethnography. That everybody is capable of learning any language, it's just the cultural acclimatisation which decides what cases are vocalised and what remain implicit in the language being learnt.

The sounds in a language are (empirically) tied with the ethnic origin of its speakers. But are these sounds really arbitrary? Is there some nexus between meaning & sound which cuts across linguistic boundaries?

Would that be a good thing, though, I wonder: I remember having this argument with a friend ("friend" (Freundin, more like)) of mine about how it's silly to assume that /*ma*/ (regexese ;) is the "most natural" sound to be learnt first because it represents the "universal" sound for mother and is "easiest" to produce physically. Bosh, quoth I, citing Disraeli (was it him?) who said, "Forgive him, for he takes the customs of his tribe to be the laws of nature." What about the Japanese who go "haha" & the Dravidians who go /*ai/? Are their kids any less "natural"?

Imagine if the "faculty for meaning" was inbuilt into our heads like the "faculty for grammar"...

Yum, I'll freeze that thought for now and thaw it out over a conversazione some other day.