By DPA
Rio de Janeiro : Brazilian author Paulo Coelho is one of the world’s best-selling authors but he considers writing not just a business but as a “path to self-knowledge”.
Coelho, who turns 60 Friday, is something of a guru to many of his worldwide legion of fans. At home, though, he is more whipping boy than wise man for literary critics.
Fellow Brazilian author and literature professor Sirio Possenti says that Coelho sells “as much as McDonald’s or Coca-Cola. So what? He can’t even write correctly”.
The target, though, is at least outwardly indifferent to such derision.
“Authors write and critics criticize,” Coelho says. “That’s just how it is.” He readily concedes that his writing style is simple.
“I learned as a lyricist and journalist that you don’t have to make things complicated to be profound,” Coelho said.
If sales matter, the numbers are on his side. For the past decade, he has consistently ranked among the world’s top two or three best-selling authors, exceeded only by literary sensations such as John Grisham, Dan Brown or J.K. Rowling.
Known in Brazil as “The Magician”, he has sold 85 million books in 60 languages, including 30 million copies of his 1988 global phenomenon “The Alchemist”.
Despite his standing as a sage to his readers, Coelho has walked a turbulent path in life.
He was born in Rio de Janeiro on Aug 24, 1947. His youthful rebelliousness and drug use led Coelho’s strict Catholic parents to commit him to a psychiatric institution.
Later, he lived the hippie lifestyle, rambling through Latin America, Africa and Europe before trying his hand as a play and screenwriter and journalist. Having gained a degree of recognition in Brazil, he found himself writing songs in the 1970s with Brazilian rock legend Raul Seixas.
Together, they tried to establish an anarchist, anti-capitalist “alternative society”, attracting the attention of Brazil’s then-military regime as possible subversives. Coelho was imprisoned and tortured.
Along the way, the young writer found himself on a spiritual search, during which he pursued Eastern religion, studied English mystic Aleister Crowley and dabbled in black magic.
In the early 1980s, Coelho’s dark, bizarre works included “Arquivos do Inferno” (Hell Archives) and “O Manual Pratico do Vampirismo” (Practical Manual of Vampirism).
As he tells it, Coelho reached a turning point when visiting the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau outside Munich, where Coelho had a vision of a man, whom he later met in an Amsterdam cafe. The figure persuaded him to make a pilgrimage to Spain’s Santiago de Compostela, which he fulfilled in 1986.
“The Pilgrimage”, which was published the next year, preceded “The Alchemist” (1988), which was followed by “Brida” (1990), all best sellers.
Calling Coelho a “global brand,” the Brazilian business magazine Exame wrote: “As an advertising character, he can sell anything.”
He splits his time between a village in the French Pyrenees and an apartment on the Copacabana, where he pounds out books typically within a few weeks secluded in an office.
Coelho shares his French home with his wife, artist Cristina Oiticica. When he’s not travelling to “collect experiences and ideas” for his books, Coelho purports to spend his time chopping wood, practising archery and surfing the Internet.
Happiness is “uninteresting”, he says. “I want adventure, risk, the feeling that I’m alive.”