Book Review
The Alchemist
2/5 stars
"I don't see what all the hubbub was about."
*******
This book only takes a few hours to read, and that is what makes it salvageable.

Other than that, it is a book full of hokey, corny metaphors (Soul of the World. Personal Legend. Soul of Gd. Language of the World.), and as I look up the symbolism...... It also has a huge amount of, um, Christological awkwardness. All the while also appropriating a lot of Jewish symbols. (In the Hebrew Bible, the Urim and the Thummim are elements of the hoshen, the breastplate worn by the High Priest attached to the ephod. )

I honestly believe that the book's popularity is because it was endorsed by a lot of celebrities (Madonna. Bill Clinton. Rush Limbaugh. Will Smith. And let's remember that Kabbalah only got popular when Madonna decided it was cute one day when she was having a mani-pedi.)

It seems like the (hackneyed) central message is to "not be afraid to follow one's dreams" and "when you want something, the whole universe conspires to help you."

Honestly, for somebody who is of a certain age (let's say, 40),  many of these ideas are frankly silly. (I think the quote is that:  "Hopes are like hair ornaments. When a girl is young, she probably wants to wear too many of them, but by the time she becomes old she looks silly wearing even one.")

1. How many people spend their whole life following that dream after that "next big business idea" when, it really would have been more cost effective to just work a nine to five job somewhere. (This has been generations of my family.)

How many young guys think that they're going to be in the NBA or they're going to make a living rapping?

2. How many people spend years in a state of wanderlust and find that what they were looking for could have been right at home? (I myself spent 11 years living in China and abroad and ended up living just a few miles away from my hometown back in the States.)

3. Every guy wants a lady with a shape like Kim Kardashian or Jen Selter, but in reality there are just not enough of them to go around. And so if you can't take who you want, you just have to take who you can get. (I just passed by a Certain Familiar Callipygian Jewish lady today. If I had followed my dreams, would I have been able to find somebody like that right where I am? Less than 2.5% of Jewish ladies would consider a black partner and black guys are seven times more numerous than Jewish girls. Somebody's dreams are going to have to run around on the rocks of reality. Of statistical necessity.)

4. The perfect is the enemy of the good. As you age, it really is possible to let your mind drift down dark corridors and wonder what might have been. And then assume that any of those possibilities would have been better than what you actually have and create a fantasy life around what may never have existed.

Since there's no way to know one way or the other, it's better to just not think about it. (Would I have been able to snag somebody like today's Callipygian Jewish Lady in an alternate reality? Would that extra body weight have stayed in the right places as the kids kept coming? Likely not. Would the jiggling go from being attractive to being a tidal wave of cottage cheese? Likely yes.)

*******
I don't understand why the author made a lot of the narrative choices that he did.

1. He is a Portuguese speaker, but a Brazilian. I don't think that the Muslim conquest of Portugal is any closer to a Brazilian than the Norman conquest of England is to an American even though both Englishmen and Americans speak English.

2. Why did he keep calling the protagonist "the boy" after he did a lot of growing up just within the first year?

3. Since this was set around the end of the 1800s, wasn't there a boat trip that could have taken people from Morocco to Egypt? (≈4,542km)
*******

There are some good aphorisms (as the author sometimes lets us know by repeating them several times):

1. "Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time."

2."It's not often the money saves a person's life."

3. "Death doesn't change anything," the boy thought.

4. "You could have died later on," a soldier said to the body of one of his companions. "You could have died after peace had been declared. But, in any case, you were going to die."

5. "Usually the threat of death makes people a lot more aware of their lives."
*******

Verdict: Not recommended. If you want to read a fiction book that is extremely quotable, I would recommend instead "Memoirs of a Geisha."

New Words:

Sacristy
Simum

Interesting concept: 

(p.116):  "Rather than being killed by a blade or bullet, he was hanged from a dead palm tree where his body twisted in the desert wind."

I do know that when Saddam Hussein was captured, he asked to be shot because he thought that was more honorable way to die. And, instead they hung him. And that was deliberately chosen to disrespect him.

Arabs been killing each other for thousands of years, and being desensitized to death / other things are definitely a certain part of their conceptual space.