Ten thousand, a million copies in America

Some 65 million copies of the works of Paulo Coehlo were already circu­lat­ing in 150 coun­tries and 60 languages when a pre-​owned copy of The Alchemist announc­ing these facts on the back cover appeared last summer in one of the (few) great remain­ing 2nd-​hand book­stores in Vancou­ver (Biblio­phile on Commer­cial Drive), which is where I came to know of its cele­brated author — a man, accord­ing to the blurb at the back of the book, whose suffer­ing at the hands of para­mil­i­tary goons in Brazil in the nineteen-​sixties “affected him profoundly,” and led him to take up the life of an “exec­u­tive in the music indus­try.” Paul Coehlo became a writer, the blurb-​writer goes on to say, after meet­ing a man in a cafe in Amster­dam whom he had seen months earlier “in a vision.”

In his intro­duc­tion to The Alchemist, Paulo Coehlo exhorts his read­ers to pursue their dreams as he has pursued his. At least one of the dreams of Paulo Coehlo, the only one alluded to in his intro­duc­tion to The Alchemist, ceased prop­erly to be a dream when, as he writes, “little by little, my dream was becom­ing real­ity,” and his books began to sell “ten, a thou­sand, a million copies in America.”

Is it the destiny of dreams then to be erased by reality?

The “essence” of Coehlo’s work rendered in a few sentences can be found in a wonder­ful arti­cle in the Busi­ness Stan­dard by Nilan­jana S Roy of New Delhi.