telegraph.co.uk에 실린 paulo coelho 기사

[jollyman]

A mystery even to himself

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 13/06/2005

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When Paulo Coelho was 17 his parents sent him to an asylum because they thought he was psychotic. Now he's the world's biggest-selling novelist - but, he says, some people still don't understand him. Interview by Elizabeth Day

Paulo Coelho is dressed entirely in black, as befits a spiritual sage whose books take as their subject the eternal human enigma. He is small, delicately proportioned and his soft grey hair has been grown into a rat's tail, of the kind one sometimes sees on Buddhist monks. He sits in the lobby of a plush London hotel - all clean minimalist lines and strangely placed mirrors - looking entirely at home, the black of his clothes contrasting decoratively with the beige upholstery.

'To have money is great because you can do what you think is important'

"Every day I try to be in communication with the universe in an unconscious way," he smiles, staring at me with big, brown earnest eyes and speaking in heavily accented English. "Yesterday, for example, I decided to walk here in London. I went, I took a taxi to Piccadilly Circus and then I felt that I was London and London was me. It happened like magic. I was crossing the street and boom! Whisht," he says, moving his arm upwards in a great sweeping arc. "Then I knew it. You can feel everything. It was very magical in that sense, you know?"

I'm afraid I don't know. I'm beginning to think that I am on an altogether different astral plane. What was it like for a 57-year-old Brazilian man being London, I wonder?

"Well, yesterday London was quite different because I was London," he says, matter-of-factly, "but London is a place for me that is alive because it is full of contradictions and this is what I love in the city. Some streets or some places bring me moments that I'm in contact with the universe and moments where everything is dull. People here co-exist in loneliness and in total communion with other people."

Paulo has never had any problem communicating with other people. In fact, he's phenomenally successful at it. Since the publication of his first work, The Pilgrimage, in 1987, he has sold 65 million books, making him the best-selling author in the world - above John Grisham, Tom Clancy and the seemingly unassailable J.K. Rowling. He has been translated into 59 languages and collected an impressive portfolio of literary prizes - among them, the French Cheval‎ier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, their most prestigious literary gong. His most famous book, The Alchemist, tells the story of an Andalusian shepherd boy in search of treasure in a far-off land and has sold more than 30 million copies since its publication in 1988.

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His latest novel, The Zahir, was published last week and is already number one in the bestseller lists of all 83 countries in which it has been released. "Except Germany. There, it is only number two because of the Da Vinci Code," says Coelho, a touch petulantly. The Zahir tells the story of a man obsessively searching for his wife, a missing war reporter. It was inspired by Coelho's latest "muse", the former Sunday Telegraph foreign correspondent Christina Lamb - who recently accused the author of "stealing my soul". "Even if I stole it, I gave it back," Coelho says, grinning. "You should treat a muse like a fairy."

The book is filled with a sort of one-size-fits-all flat-pack spirituality that anyone can take home and assemble. "Love had spoken to me," we are informed at one point, "'I am everything and I am nothing. I am the wind, and I cannot enter windows and the doors are shut.'" The heroine skips around the world distributing patches of blood-stained cloth from the uniform of a dead soldier to remind people that love is the last thing a dying person thinks of. The book is bound to sell terrifically well.

The impressive sales figures have provided Coelho with a very comfortable life. He spends half the year in an custom-designed flat overlooking the Copacabana beach with his fourth wife, Christina Oiticica, a sculptress; and the other half working in his country house in the French Pyrenees. He flies first class between the two.

"Of course, to have money is just great because you can do what you think is important to you," he says, before reminding me of the work of The Paulo Coelho Institute, which gives free schooling to 360 Brazilian street children. "I always was a rich person because money's not related to happiness."

Coincidentally, this is also the message behind The Alchemist. The Andalusian shepherd finds his treasure within a mere 170 pages, but only after following a bewildering array of "omens" and being taught to feel "vibrations of peace" that arise when one speaks the "Language of the World". Coelho himself pays great attention to omens - he will start writing a new book only after finding a white feather.

"The white feather thing started before my first book, The Pilgrimage. I asked myself, shall I write that book? I was not sure and I said if I see a feather today, I'm going to write; if I don't see it it's not in my destiny. I found it so I said I have to write. And the next book, I followed the same ritual and then it became a tradition and now I cannot write unless I find a white feather."

Did he find one yesterday, I wonder, when he became London? There are, after all, lots of stray pigeon feathers in Trafalgar Square.

"It's easy to find the white feather, this is not the problem," he says, sternly. "The problem is to find a white feather in the January of an odd year. That is the challenge that I put to myself. That is what I must do every time."

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Coelho's books all tend to feature some sort of spiritual quest, written in accessibly pared-down language which leads the reader inexorably towards a thumping great moral climax. Julia Roberts and Madonna are said to love his work. President Clinton was pictured with a copy of The Alchemist at the height of Monica-gate. In 1999, the former Chilean dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, was pictured with a selection of pastel-hued Coelho titles in his bookcase, jostling for space alongside The Guinness Encyclopaedia of Warfare and Aspects of the Third Reich.

"I cannot judge the reader. This is the only reader that I know," Coelho says, thumping himself on the chest, "the only reader that I've met and the only reader that I know fairly well, but not very well. Fortunately, I'm still a mystery to myself."

And for all that Madonna might rave about him, his books, it seems, are still a mystery to many. The blurb on the back of The Zahir states modestly that: "Paulo is a writer who inspires nations." For his critics, however, he seems more likely to inspire consternation. His books have been variously dismissed as "spiritual twaddle", "tosh," and "something David Hasselhoff might spout after a particularly taxing Baywatch rescue". The hero of The Zahir, who happens to be a best-selling author with a sideline in seducing women, cuts out key phrases from reviews and sticks them in a notebook, along with reviews from previous years. "They basically said the same thing," Coelho writes, " '… short sentences, superficial style …' (as if long sentences equalled profundity)."

Did he keep a similar scrapbook himself?

"I did that for quite a while, then I realised that it was the same criticism every time, so I didn't need to bother with it, the reviews didn't change.

"I write from my soul. This is the reason that critics don't hurt me, because it is me. If it was not me, if I was pretending to be someone else, then this could unbalance my world, but I know who I am."

He knows who he is and yet he remains a mystery to himself: it's a tricky business being Paulo Coelho. The facts of his life are no more straightforward. Born in 1947 in Rio de Janeiro, he grew up in a deeply religious household and was educated by Jesuits. His determination to be a writer from an early age - a dangerous profession to pursue in a country under repressive military rule - led to his parents incarcerating him in a lunatic asylum when he was just 17.

He takes issue with me when I say that this must have been a traumatic experience. "I would not agree with the word traumatic. I've had my share of difficulties but I never saw myself as a victim. So when you talk about critics, this is peanuts, you know, this is nothing.

"My parents thought I was psychotic. That was the diagnosis. I used to read a lot, I was very shy and I didn't socialise very easily. They were desperate. It wasn't that they wanted to hurt me, but they didn't know what to do.

"I have forgiven them [Coelho's mother is now dead, but his father still lives in Brazil]. They did not do that to destroy me, they did that to save me. And it happens with love, all the time - when you have this love towards someone else, but you want this person to change, to be like you. And then love can be very destructive. It is up to you to say, 'Stop, I love you but I'm going to do what is better for me and at the end of the day, you're going to realise that I was right.' Then you work through a difficult period, with your parents, or your husband or wife, and then you're happy, or full of joy and they will be full of the same joy."

Coelho escaped from the asylum three times and was eventually released in 1967. Before realising that writing was his "destiny", he enrolled in law school, dropped out to become a hippy, and for several years wrote lyrics for Raul Seixas, the Brazilian rock star.

Then, in 1974, Coelho was arrested for "subversive" activities by the ruling militia (the authorities saw Coelho's lyrics - some of them influenced by the teaching of the satanist Aleister Crowley - as left-wing and dangerous). He was bundled into a car, taken to a secret headquarters and tortured with electric shocks to his genitals.

'I think I was more frightened when I was in jail than I have ever been, and afterwards I was frightened for seven years," he says now, taking a long drag on his cigarette. "In this case, it is a traumatic experience, but then after seven years, time heals everything and, er, today I'm engaged in several projects of civil rights, Amnesty International included. Every time that I see there is something wrong, I think it is my responsibility to voice my opposition. It may not work, but at least I am not silent. I'm not a coward. I have my fears, but I am not a coward."

Coelho is not keen on cowardice. He relates, in great detail, how he was on a recent flight to London and was told by the air steward that he was unable to leave the aeroplane on a stopover - he can't remember where - in order to have a cigarette.

"I don't care whether I have permission or not," Coelho explains, with a Latin shrug. So he left the plane to have a cigarette in the airport and, on his return, was accosted by the air steward.

An argument followed, in which Coelho insisted that the head of the airport be called to referee.

"Then, of course, he put the blame on the air steward and I said, 'OK, but I want to have a letter of apology.' But I knew that it was a little bit cowardly of me not to have a reaction on the spot. I should have said to the steward, 'You saw me smoking? F--- you.' Then my soul could have been cleared of any bad feeling."

He sits back in his chair, as if waiting to be congratulated, then adds as an afterthought: "I felt guilty because everyone was waiting for 20 minutes at the airport, but at the same time, I could not fly to London with this bad omen, this bad energy on my shoulders."

I'm not sure that there's anything spiritually cleansing about throwing one's weight about, but perhaps mystics have off days like the rest of us.

[Khan]

The Zahir, The Alchemist에 대한 글이 있네요. 기사를 읽어 보니 "연금술사"는 어찌보면, 파울로 코엘료가 살아가는 삶의 방식이 아닐까 하는 생각이 듭니다.

[Eugene]

흥미로운기사네요... ^ㅡ^

[phil]

전 왜 웹상으로 글을 못 읽겠죠..한국어든 영어든 간에 도무지 집중이 안되요 ㅜㅜ 그나저나 군대있을때 The Zahir 한글판으로 읽었는데 생각이 하나도 안나네요;;

[Khan]

저도 웹상으로 글을 읽을 땐, 잘 안들어오는데, 이건 그래도 제가 현재 읽는 책이라서 그런지, 그래도 조금 더 읽기는 편하네요