Book SUMMARY 3: The Alchemist: Paulo Coelho

 

The Alchemist is a story so simple yet so complicated.

The Alchemist is a short novel with the most magnetic pull towards the  readers. It is to me at least.😇😇 The plot of the story is so involving I bet you can't take your eyes off once you set your eyes into  the story. 👀👀

It's story is quite simple yet it explains the most difficult life lessons.The story plot is somewhat based on our everyday life. 🤔🤔

 We people are living each and every second of our lives to seek something. That something could be food 🥘🥘, house🏡🏡, money or wealth or prosperity. 🤑🤑 That something can be someone you love or admire 👩‍❤️‍👨👩‍❤️‍👨. That SOMETHING could be ANYTHING. From a minor mirror to gigantic pyramids. 

Every person when they wake up in the morning they seek something. Of course most of us seek money so they go to work💰💰. Some seek for good body features so they for exercise 🏋️‍♂️💪. Some seek for food so they cook or eat 🍳🍳. They seek a lot of different things. 

Likewise people seek to become someone valuable in their life. So they seek an ambition. They seek whatever they wish. 👨‍🔬👩‍🎨💃

That something that we seek or tend to seek in the future is called PERSONAL LEGEND 🔬🔬 as described in the story.

 It is sometimes ironic to say that the SOMETHING we keep seeking is eventually seeking us. It is because when we seek that SOMETHING we never find it when we need it.😲😲

 Though the very thing is always at our doorstep. We go places and visit number of people to find our PERSONAL LEGEND. But in the end  the PERSONAL LEGEND  is with us or within ourselves. 🧐🧐🤨🤨

The Alchemist is the best selling novel written by Brazilian author Paulo Cohelo. It was published in 1988, yet the craving for the novel is still present in the readers even now. The story is such that the plot happens to inter relates with today's time and conditions.⏳⏰

The Alchemist represents a shepherd boy on the behalf of the common people seeking to reach their ambitions. 🤠🤠🐄🐄

Part 1:

The main protagonist of the novel is a shepherd boy named Santiago from the Andalusian plains of Spain. The boy always wishes to travel. He enjoys visiting places and interacting with new people. He is one of a kind who can't stick to one place and be committed to one lifelong job.🛳️🛳️ 

So The Alchemist follows the journey of an Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago. His journey from the Andalusian plains of Spain to Pyramids of Egypt.

 The boy happens to see a recurring dream as often. The very recurring dream troubles Santiago, a young and adventurous Andalusian shepherd. He has the dream every time he sleeps under a  ivy sycamore  tree that grows out of the ruins of a church.  During the dream, a child tells him to seek treasure at the foot of the Egyptian pyramids.He is in a field with his flock when visited by a child who transports him to the pyramids in Egypt. And he travels with the very chilld to the pyramids. The child says that  Santiago will find a hidden treasure at the foot of the Great Pyramids💰💰.

 Every time the dreams ends at the Great Pyramids but not further. So he thinks that the dream has something to do with his life. He becomes really troubled and goes to seek a fortune teller. Believing a recurring dream to be prophetic, he asks a Gypsy fortune teller in the nearby town about its meaning. The woman interprets the dream as a prophecy and tells the boy that he will discover a treasure at the Egyptian pyramids. She also suggests him to go to the pyramids if he wants to be rich. 

So he becomes determined to go to the Pyramids as he sees in his dreams. 

The Alchemist has many themes, but its overriding message is that people must follow their dreams.

 

He has to have a lot of money 💰 to go to the pyramids. So he decides to collect some money for the travel. 

Early into his journey, he meets an old king named Melchizedek, or the king of Salem, who tells him to sell his sheep, so as to travel to Egypt. It is the old man who tells Santiago about dreams and ambition and introduces the idea of a Personal Legend. He further says that Your Personal Legend "is what you have always wanted to accomplish. Everyone, when they are young, knows what their Personal Legend is." He then exchange a very difficult tome with the book the boy had. The boy finds the book difficult to understand yet he accepts the exchange. 

The boy always carries:

1.a book to read while the sheeps are grazing, 

2.a bottle of wine 

3. Some snacks and food to eat during the grazing.

Part 2:

So he finds himself a ship to travel overseas. Within days he reaches the other end of the world. Since he has a lot of money 💰 from selling his sheep, he has no worries about fooding and lodging. 

He goes to a nearby restaurant to have some food. There he happens to meet a stranger. The stranger tries to behave friendly with Santiago and warns him of the pickpockets and cutpurses in the city area. Santiago shares his plan to the stranger and the strangers offers him to be his guide. The boy is so innocent that he immediately agrees and also lends him the purse full of money. How naive!! 😕😕

But when he  wanders along the marketplace of the city the man cheats Santiago and runs away with all his money. Santiago is now left with no money 💰 at all. He then decides to recide at the very place ,work and collect enough money to travel to the Pyramids. 

 Santiago then embarks on a long path of working for a crystal merchant so as to make enough money to fulfill his personal legend and go to the pyramids. He decides to work there for just a month or two enough to collect money to go to pyramids.

The crystal shop was previously at a loss. When the boy enters the shop he applies a strategy to attract the customers towards the shop. It so happens that more and more customers starts coming and the shop finally earns a bunch of profit. The crystal shop owner is really pleased with the boy and treats Santiago as his son. But weeks and weeks passes by Santiago is unable to leave the place like that. He is so emotionally and physically attached to the place. Even so he decides to leave the place to seek for his dreams. After two years finally he leaves the place without even meeting or saying final words of goodbye to the shop owner. He is sure to be emotionally drained at his last departure.

So the boy books a train tickets for the desert. Since pyramids is past the desert. Along the way, the boy meets an Englishman who has come in search of an alchemist and continues his travels with his new companion. He suddenly realises that the book that was given to him by the old man who bought his sheep's was being read by the same English man. He got curious and asked the man about its difficulty in understanding. He happens to be  searching for the secret of alchemy himself , a 200-year-old alchemist who lives at an oasis that is on the way to The Pyramids of Egypt. He has a desire of turning metal into gold.

Then finally they reach the oasis on camels. The oasis is a group of travellers camping to reach their respective destination when the war at the both sides ends. After spending a lot of days at the oasis he finds himself falling in love with the girl named Fatima. And he no longer desires to go in search for the treasures or the pyramids. He wants to commit his rest of the life towards Fatima and return to Spain.

The caravan couldn't be moving forward and  is halted at the oasis due to tribal warfare.  While he was at the oasis, he found who the Englishman was looking for.

 He finds that the Alchemist that the English man was looking for was also seeking.

Part 3:

 Despite the tribal warfare both of them  together cross the Sahara desert in search of Santiago’s Personal Legend. The Alchemist doesn’t tell Santiago anything new, but rather reminds him to listen to his heart and to find the power that he already possesses. He insists him in finding his dreams in the name of the PERSONAL LEGEND

After heading out towards the Pyramids of Egypt, Santiago and The alchemist are soon captured by another group of warriors in the desert. The writer tries to explain that in the path of seeking your PERSONAL LEGEND there occurs a number of obstacles. The warriors takes them for a spy and threatens to take both of their lives. The alchemist tells the group that they are in search of a treasure.  tells Santiago that, in order to continue on the trip, he should become the wind word. The alchemist makes a deal with the warriors and tells them that if Santiago can’t turn himself into the wind in three days times, they can take the alchemist’s and Santiago’s life.

Santiago is infact very frightened during his trial of the third day. He doubts himself at every step of the way. But on the third day, Santiago speaks to the earth and concentrates on the desert. His ability to speak to the desert eventually helps him to speak to the wind. Together, the wind and the desert create a sandstorm greater than anything the warriors have ever seen. This causes the warriors to fear Santiago and the alchemist, who immediately free the two of them and allow them to continue on their journey. So both of them are relieved that they have saved their lives with a little lie and some useful tactics.

After a few more days of travel, Santiago and the alchemist make it to a monastery. Here the alchemist

Truly turns some lead into gold and divides it. He truly proves himself an Alchemist and is successful in finding his PERSONAL LEGEND. Since he has found his PERSONAL LEGEND his journey stops here. He has to return to the oasis, but Santiago proceeds, and eventually reaches the pyramids now all on his  own.

Finally he reaches the pyramids. The same pyramids he sees in his recurring dream. Now when he finally at the pyramids he is unable to find the spot where the treasures is hidden . He sheds a tear from not knowing what to do next. His tear lands on a scarab beetle, which Santiago remembers is a sign of God. Right then and there, he starts digging for his treasure.

After hours of digging, Santiago is approached by raiders who make him dig and plan on stealing the treasure while severely beating him and intend on leaving him for dead.

He explains about his prophetic dream to the raiders. The raiders do not believe him. After conspiring about his dream to the raiders, they laugh at him and don’t waste any more of their time on somebody who is crazy enough to believe in a treasure just because their dreams told them it was there.

Before leaving, one of the leader raiders reminisces on his dream, mentioning that he had a dream about a treasure buried by an abandoned church in Spain. He is so very shocked that the place where he originally started his journey the leader of the thieves at the other end of the world knows about it. Eventually he doesn't find anything at the place he is digging.  At that moment, Santiago knew where his treasure was. It was at the church that he used to sleep in when he was once a shepherd.

He then decides to return back to where he came from.After going back to the monastery to reclaim the last piece of gold the alchemist had left him, he returns to the church in Spain where he used to sleep and starts digging at the place where he once used to lay his head.

After 30 minutes of digging, Santiago strikes gold. His Personal Legend is fulfilled, and it all started at the place where he first set out. WOW !!SANTIAGO FINALLY FINDS HIS PERSONAL LEGEND.

 We often look for others for advice  to a way of life that isn’t our own. But in the book, Coelho reminds us that life is a treasure in and of itself. We shouldn’t be following the ideas and desires of others. Only once we start to follow our own dreams and Personal Legend will we then find the treasure that we are all in search of. Of course we can get distracted or challenged as was Santiago but as he kept seeking his PERSONAL LEGEND we also ought to seek our PERSONAL LEGEND no matter what.

FINALLY:

This book and it's story plot is so incredibly powerful  and magnetic that encourages you to once again find your dreams and will start guiding you towards them.As The Old King said, “when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it”. So at last "WHERE THERE IS A WILL, THERE IS A WAY".

By Sanjita Napit