Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life

by Fernando Morais

  Another argument used to explain his success–the low cultural level of Brazilians, who are little used to reading–was soon to be demolished by the arrival of Paulo’s books in the two most important publishing markets, America and France. This began in the United States at the end of 1990. Paulo was staying in Campinas, 100 kilometres from São Paulo, preparing for a debate on his book Brida with students at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp), when the telephone rang. On the other end of the line was Alan Clarke, a man in his fifties, owner of the Gentleman’s Farmer, a five-room bed-and-breakfast hotel in the small town of West Barnstable, in Massachusetts. Speaking fluent Portuguese, Clarke explained that during his free time, he worked as a certified translator and had worked for some years in Brazil as an executive with ITT, which dominated the telecommunications industry in a large part of the world until the end of the 1980s. He had read and enjoyed The Pilgrimage and was offering to translate it into English.

  Paulo knew that the American market could be a springboard to the rest of the world, but he was not excited by the idea and said: ‘Thank you for your interest, but what I need is a publisher in the United States, not a translator.’

  Clarke was not put off: ‘All right, then, can I try and find a publisher for the book?’

  Sure that the conversation would lead nowhere, Paulo agreed. Never having worked before on a literary project, Alan Clarke translated the 240 pages of The Pilgrimage and set off with his English translation under his arm. After hearing the word ‘No’ twenty-two times, he came across someone who was interested. All his efforts had been worth it, because the publisher was none other than HarperCollins, at the time the largest in the United States. It was not until 1992, when Paulo was launching The Valkyries in Brazil, that The Pilgrimage, under the title The Diary of a Magician, was published (the title was changed much later). Days and weeks went by and it became clear that the book was never going to be a blockbuster. ‘The book simply didn’t happen,’ the author recalls. ‘It got no media coverage and was practically ignored by the critics.’

  However, this lack of success did not dishearten his agent-cum-translator. Some months after its launch, Clarke took his translation of The Alchemist to HarperCollins, and the book won the hearts of all the professional readers invited to give their opinion as to whether or not to launch it on the American market. HarperCollins’ enthusiasm for the book can be judged by the size of the initial print run: 50,000 hardback copies. HarperCollins’ instincts were shown to be right: in a few weeks, the book was in the best-seller lists of important newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune. The hardback version was so successful that the publisher didn’t put the paperback version on the market until two years later.

  The explosion of The Alchemist opened doors to markets of which the author had never even dreamed. Published in Australia immediately after its publication in the United States, The Alchemist was acclaimed by the Sydney Morning Herald as ‘the book of the year’. The newspaper stated that it was ‘an enchanting work of infinite philosophical beauty’. Australian readers seemed to agree, since weeks after arriving in the bookshops it was number one on the Herald’s own best-seller list. However, Paulo was dreaming of greater things. He knew that recognition as an author would come not from New York or Sydney but from the other side of the Atlantic. His dream was to be published, and above all read, in France, the land of Victor Hugo, Flaubert and Balzac.

  At the beginning of 1993, during a short trip to Spain, Paulo was asked by the agent Carmen Balcells if she could represent him. The owner of the most respected literary agency in Europe, Balcells counted among her authors Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez. Her request was a huge temptation, especially since, unlike most literary agents, among them Mônica Antunes, who received 15 per cent, the agency took only 10 per cent of its authors’ royalties.

  Paulo had been concerned for some time about his and Mônica’s complete lack of experience in the foreign publishing world. Neither of them had the necessary contacts. He was worried that Mônica would waste her youth on trying to sell his work abroad, a venture that had so far lasted four years and brought no real results. ‘It was my duty to tell her that she could never make a living working solely as my international agent,’ the author recalled some time later. ‘For her to be able to live well I would have to sell millions of books abroad, and that wasn’t happening.’ They needed to have a talk. After giving the matter serious thought, he invited her for a coffee in a small bar in Barcelona and came straight to the point. More than a dialogue, their conversation was a kind of tense verbal arm-wrestle.

  ‘You know who Carmen Balcells is, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, she sent me this letter proposing that her agency represent me. You’re investing in someone you believe in, but let’s be realistic: we’re not getting anywhere. This business needs experience; it’s a serious gamble.’

  Mônica did not appear to understand what she was hearing, but Paulo went on: ‘Let’s accept that our work hasn’t, as we hoped, borne fruit. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s my life that’s at stake, but I don’t want you also to sacrifice yours in search of a dream that seems impossible.’

  She could hardly believe what she was hearing.

  ‘So, realistically speaking, what do you think about us terminating our professional relationship? If I want to go to Carmen Balcells now, I will. I’ll pay you for all the years of work you’ve put in and I’ll get on with my life. But the final decision is up to you. You’ve invested four years of your life in me, and I’m not going to be the one who gets rid of you. It’s just that you have to understand that it would be best for both of us to call a halt. Do you agree?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What do you mean “No”? I’m going to pay you for the time you’ve given me, for all your efforts. It’s not as if I had a contract with you, Mônica.’

  ‘No way. If you want to get rid of me, you can, but I’m not going to ask to leave.’

  ‘You know who Carmen Balcells is, don’t you? You’re asking me to say “No” to her? She’s going to announce that she is taking me on by filling the Frankfurt Book Fair with posters of my books, and you want me to say “No”?’

  ‘No. I’m saying that you can sack me, if you want. You’re free to do as you wish. After all, you made a separate deal with Alan Clarke in the States, didn’t you? I think that I could do much better than him.’

  Her utter conviction meant that Paulo could go no further. In a second, his dream of posters in Frankfurt and being in the same catalogue as García Márquez and Vargas Llosa had evaporated. He had swapped the elegant offices in central Barcelona occupied by Carmen Balcells and her dozens of employees for Sant Jordi Asociados, which was nothing more than a bookshelf with some cardboard files in the small apartment where Mônica lived.

  In September, she plucked up her courage and prepared to face her first big challenge: to try to sell Paulo Coelho at the most important annual meeting of publishers and literary agents, the Frankfurt Book Fair.

  At twenty-five, with no experience in the field and afraid of facing this challenge alone, she decided she needed the company of a friend, her namesake Mônica Moreira. The first surprise when she arrived in Frankfurt was the discovery that there wasn’t a single hotel room to be found in the city. It hadn’t occurred to them to make reservations in advance and so they ended up having to sleep in a youth hostel in a neighbouring town. For the four days that the fair lasted, Mônica worked like a Trojan. Unlike the posters and banners used by Balcells, her only weapon was a modest publicity kit–a brief biography and a summary of the success Paulo’s books had enjoyed in Brazil and in other countries. She visited the stands of publishers from all over the world one by one, arranging as many meetings as possible. Her efforts were royally rewarded: by the end of the year, Mônica had sold the rights of Paulo Coelho’s books in no fewer than sixteen languages. />
  The first contract she negotiated in Frankfurt, with the Norwegian publisher ExLibris, also had the virtue of changing her personal life: four years later, in 1997, the owner of ExLibris, Øyvind Hagen, and Mônica decided to marry. In a matter of months, she drew up contracts for the publication of The Pilgrimage, The Alchemist, or both, not only in Norway but also in Australia, Japan, Portugal, Mexico, Romania, Argentina, South Korea and Holland.

  In the same year, 1993, Paulo entered the Brazilian version of The Guinness Book of Records after The Alchemist had been in Veja’s best-seller list for an impressive 208 consecutive weeks. However, there was still no sign from France. Mônica had sent the American version of The Alchemist to several French publishers, but none showed any interest in this unknown Brazilian. One of those who turned down Paulo Coelho’s books was Robert Laffont, the owner of a traditional, reputable publishing house founded during the Second World War. The indifference with which The Alchemist was received was such that a reader’s report–so important in deciding the fate of a book–was delegated to the only person in the company who spoke Portuguese, an administrative secretary, who was responsible for the book’s rejection.

  Destiny, however, seems to have decided that the literary future of Paulo Coelho in France would lie with the Laffont family anyway. At the beginning of 1993, Robert’s daughter Anne had left her position as adviser in her father’s company to set up her own publishing house, the tiny Éditions Anne Carrière. This was not a hobby to fill her time but a business in which she and her husband, Alain, had invested all their money and for which they still had to beg loans from banks, friends and relatives. The company was not yet three months old when Brigitte Gregony, Anne’s cousin and best friend (and one of the investors who had put money into the new publishing house), telephoned from Barcelona, where she was on holiday, to say that she had read the Spanish translation ‘of a fascinating book called El Alquimista, written by an unknown Brazilian’. Unable to read a word of Spanish or Portuguese, Anne simply relied upon her cousin’s opinion (and a quick reading by her son, Stephen, who knew a little Spanish), and asked her to find out whether the publishing rights were held by anyone in France. When she found Mônica, Brigitte learned that The Alchemist was coming out in the United States in May and that the agent would send her a copy as soon as it was published.

  Anne appeared prepared to put all her energies into the project. Although she offered a mere US$5,000 advance on royalties, to compensate she called upon a top translator, Jean Orecchioni, who had translated the entire works of Jorge Amado into French. Brigitte, who had been the fairy godmother of the publication, did not live long enough to see the success of The Alchemist in France: in July, before the book was ready, she died of a brain tumour. Many years later, Anne Carrière dedicated her memoirs to her, Une chance infinie: l’histoire d’une amitié (Éditions la Table Ronde), in which she talks about her relationship with Paulo Coelho and reveals the behind-the-scenes story of how he came to be the most successful Latin-American writer in France.

  The wheels of the publishing business grind exceedingly slow all over the world, and the launch of the book was pushed forward to March 1994, when Paulo was about to publish his fifth title in Brazil, Na Margem do Rio Piedra eu Sentei e Chorei, or By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept. Anne was faced by a double problem: how to launch the book of an unknown author published by an equally unknown publishing house? How to make booksellers stop to look at one book among thousands? She decided to produce a special, numbered edition of The Alchemist, which would be sent to 500 French booksellers a month before its launch. On the fourth page of the book was a short statement written by her: ‘Paulo Coelho is a Brazilian author famous throughout Latin America. The Alchemist tells the story of a young shepherd who leaves his homeland to follow a dream: the search for a treasure hidden at the foot of the pyramids. In the desert he will come to understand the language of signs and the meaning of life and, most important of all, he will learn to let his heart speak. He will fulfil his destiny.’ On the book’s spine was a sentence used by HarperCollins for the launch in the United States: ‘The Alchemist is a magical book. Reading this book is like getting up at dawn and seeing the sun rise while the rest of the world is still sleeping.’

  While half the road to success was guaranteed by the booksellers’ favourable reception, the other half would be determined by the critics, whose reaction could not have been better. The most important of the French newspapers and magazines, among them Le Nouvel Observateur (which, years later, became a harsh critic of the author), carried highly favourable reviews, as Anne Carrière describes in her memoirs:

  With what appears to be a simple tale, Paulo Coelho soothes the hearts of men and makes them reflect upon the world around them. A fascinating book that sows the seeds of good sense in the mind and opens up the heart.

  (Annette Colin Simard, Le Journal du Dimanche)

  Paulo Coelho is a testament to the virtue of clarity, which makes his writing like a cool stream flowing beneath cool trees, a path of energy along which he leads the reader, all unwitting, towards himself and his mysterious, distant soul.

  (Christian Charrière, L’Express)

  It is a rare book, like an unexpected treasure that one should savour and share.

  (Sylvie Genevoix, L’Express)

  It is a book that does one good.

  (Danièle Mazingarbe, Madame Figaro)

  Written in a simple, very pure language, this story of a journey of initiation across the desert–where, at every step, one sign leads to another, where all the mysteries of the world meet in an emerald, where one finds ‘the soul of the world’, where there is a dialogue with the wind and the sun–literally envelops one.

  (Annie Copperman, Les Échos)

  The joy of his narrative overcomes our preconceptions. It is very rare, very precious, in the torrid, asphyxiating present day to breathe a little fresh air.

  (Le Nouvel Observateur)

  Now all that was needed was to wait and reap the harvest, and that was not long in coming. The cautious initial print run of 4,000 copies ran out in the bookshops in a matter of days and at the end of April, when 18,000 copies had been sold, The Alchemist appeared for the first time on a best-seller list in the weekly Livres Hebdo. Intended for the publishing world, this was not a publication for the public at large and the book was given only twentieth place, but, as Mônica had predicted, this was just the start. In May, The Alchemist was in ninth place in the most important best-seller list, that of the weekly magazine L’Express, where it remained for an incredible 300 consecutive weeks. The book was a success in several countries besides Brazil, but its acclaim in the United States and France would mean that the author would no longer be considered merely a Latin-American eccentricity and would become a worldwide phenomenon.

  CHAPTER 27

  World fame

  WHILE THE WORLD WAS BOWING THE KNEE to Paulo Coelho, the Brazilian critics remained faithful to the maxim coined by the composer Tom Jobim, according to which ‘in Brazil someone else’s success is felt as a personal affront, a slap in the face’, and they continued to belittle his books. The massive success of The Alchemist in France seems to have encouraged him to confront his critics. ‘Before, my detractors could conclude, wrongly, that Brazilians were fools because they read me,’ he declared to the journalist Napoleão Sabóia of O Estado de São Paulo. ‘Now that my books are selling so well abroad, it’s hard to universalize that accusation of stupidity.’ Not so. For the critic Silviano Santiago, who had a PhD in literature from the Sorbonne, being a best-seller even in a country like France meant absolutely nothing. ‘It’s important to demystify his success in France,’ he told Veja. ‘The French public is as mediocre and as lacking in sophistication as the general public anywhere.’ Some did not even go to the trouble of opening Paulo’s books in order to condemn them. ‘I’ve not read them and I don’t like them’ was the judgement given by Davi Arrigucci, Jr, another respected critic and profess
or of literature at the University of São Paulo. However, none of this seemed to matter to Paulo’s Brazilian readers, still less his foreign ones. On the contrary. Judging by the numbers, his army of readers and admirers seemed to be growing in the same proportion as the virulence of his critics. The situation was to be repeated in 1994 when, as well as By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept, he launched a 190-page book, Maktub–a collection of the mini-chronicles, fables and reflections he had been publishing in the Folha de São Paulo since 1993.

  Just as The Valkyries had been inspired by the penance Paulo and Chris had undertaken in 1988 in the Mojave Desert, in By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept Paulo shares with his readers yet another spiritual experience, the Road to Rome, which he undertook in the south of France, partly in the company of Mônica Antunes. In the 236 pages of the book, he describes seven days in the life of Pilar, a twenty-nine-year-old student who is struggling to complete her studies in Zaragoza in Spain and who meets up again with a colleague with whom she’d had an adolescent affair. The meeting takes place after a conference organized by the young man–who remains nameless in the book, as do all the other characters apart from the protagonist. Now a seminarian and a devotee of the Immaculate Conception, he confesses his love for Pilar during a trip from Madrid to Lourdes. The book, according to Paulo, is about the fear of loving and of total surrender that pursues humanity as though it were a form of original sin. On the way back to Zaragoza, Pilar sits down on the bank of the river Piedra, a small river 100 kilometres south of the city, and there she sheds her tears so that they may join other rivers and flow on out into the ocean.