Centred more upon the rituals and symbols of Catholicism than on the magical themes of his previous books, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept received unexpected praise from the clergy, such as the Cardinal-Archbishop of São Paulo, Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns, but there were no such surprises from the critics. As had been the case with all five of his previous books, both Rio Piedra and Maktub were torn apart by the Brazilian media. The critic Geraldo Galvão Ferraz, of the São Paulo Jornal da Tarde, branded By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept as ‘a poorly mixed cocktail of mediocre mysticism, religion and fiction, full of clichés and stereotypical characters who spend the greater part of their time giving solemn speeches’. The author’s approach to what he calls ‘the feminine side of God’ was ridiculed by another journalist as ‘a Paulo Coelho for girls’. The magazine Veja handed the review of Maktub to Diogo Mainardi, who derided certain passages, comparing Maktub to a pair of dirty socks that he had left in his car:
In truth all this nonsense would mean nothing if Paulo Coelho were merely a charlatan who earns a little money from other people’s stupidity. I would never waste my time reviewing a mediocre author if he simply produced the occasional manual of esoteric clichés. However, things aren’t quite like that. At the last Frankfurt Book Fair, the theme of which was Brazil, Paulo Coelho was marketed as a real writer, as a legitimate representative of Brazilian literature. That really is too much. However bad our writers might be, they’re still better than Paulo Coelho. He can do what he likes, but he shouldn’t present himself as a writer. When all’s said and done, there’s about as much literature in Paulo Coelho as there is in my dirty socks.
As on previous occasions, such reviews had no effect whatsoever on sales. While derided in the pages of newspapers and magazines, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept sold 70,000 copies on the first day, more than The Valkyries. Some weeks after its launch, Maktub also appeared in the best-seller lists. The only difference was that this time, the victim of the attacks was thousands of kilometres from Rio, travelling through France with Anne Carrière in response to dozens of invitations for talks and debates with his growing number of French readers.
Despite the enormous success achieved by the author, Paulo’s presence at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1994, the first in which he had taken part, had made it clear that preconceptions about his work were not just the privilege of Brazilian critics but also of his fellow writers. Although the position of Minister of Culture was, at the time, held by an old friend of the author’s, the diplomat Luiz Roberto do Nascimento e Silva, the brother of his ex-girlfriend Maria do Rosário, when it came to organizing a party of eighteen writers to represent Brazilian literature–Brazil was the guest of honour–Paulo was not included. According to Nascimento e Silva, writers were chosen who were popular with or familiar to German readers. Paulo’s trip, therefore, was paid by Editora Rocco. In order to celebrate the contracts being signed around the world, his German publisher at the time, Peter Erd, owner of the publishing house of the same name, gave a cocktail party to which he invited all of Paulo’s publishers present at the book fair and, naturally enough, all the members of the Brazilian delegation. The party was well attended, but not entirely a success because only two other Brazilian writers were present, and of the other delegation members, only Chico Buarque was polite enough to phone to give his excuses, since he would be giving a talk at the same time. A lone voice, that of Jorge Amado, who was not part of the delegation, spoke out loudly in Paulo’s defence: ‘The only thing that makes Brazilian intellectuals attack Paulo Coelho is his success.’ In spite of this, in 1995, the fever that the British magazine Publishing News called ‘Coelhomania’ and the French media ‘Coelhisme’ reached pandemic proportions. Sought out by the French director Claude Lelouch and then by the American Quentin Tarantino, both of whom were interested in adapting The Alchemist for the cinema, Paulo replied that the giant American Warner Brothers had got there first and bought the rights for US$300,000. Roman Polanski had told journalists that he hoped to be able to film The Valkyries. In May, when Anne Carrière was preparing for the launch of an edition of The Alchemist to be illustrated by Moebius, HQ, owners of Hachette and Elle, announced that the Elle Grand Prix for Literature that year had been awarded to Paulo Coelho. This caused such a stir that he earned the privilege of being featured in the ‘Portrait’ section of the magazine Lire, the bible of the French literary world.
But the crowning glory came in October. After thirty-seven weeks in second place, The Alchemist dethroned Le Premier Homme, an unfinished novel by Albert Camus, and went on to head the best-seller list in L’Express. Two famous critics compared The Alchemist to another national glory, Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. ‘I had the same feeling when I read both books,’ wrote Frédéric Vitoux in his column in the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur. ‘I was enchanted by the sensibility and the freshness, the innocence of soul.’ His colleague Eric Deschot, of the weekly Actuel, shared his opinion: ‘It is not a sacrilegious comparison, since the simplicity, transparency and purity of this fable remind me of the mystery of Saint-Exupéry’s story.’
Paulo received news that he had leapt into first place in L’Express while he was in the Far East, where he had gone with Chris to take part in a series of launches and debates with readers. One afternoon, as the shinkansen, the Japanese bullet train taking them from Nagoia to Tokyo, was speeding past the snow-covered Mount Fuji, the writer made a decision: when he returned to Brazil, he would change publishers. The decision was not the result of some sign that only he had noticed: it came after a long period of reflection on his relationship with Rocco. Among other disagreements, Paulo was demanding a distribution system that would open up sales outlets other than bookshops, such as newspaper stands and supermarkets, so that his books could reach readers on lower incomes. Rocco had asked for a study by Fernando Chinaglia, an experienced newspaper and magazine distributor, but the plan went no further. On 15 February 1995, the columnist Zózimo Barroso do Amaral published a note in O Globo informing his readers that ‘one of the most envied marriages in the literary world’ was coming to an end.
The other newspapers picked up the scoop and some days later, the entire country knew that, for US$1 million, Paulo Coelho was moving from Rocco to Editora Objetiva, who would publish his next book, O Monte Cinco, or The Fifth Mountain. This vast sum–more than had ever been paid to any other Brazilian author–would not all go into his pocket, but would be divided up more or less as it had been with Rocco: 55 per cent as an advance on royalties and the remaining 45 per cent to be invested in publicity. This was a big gamble for Roberto Feith, a journalist, economist and ex-international correspondent with the television network Globo, who had taken control of Objetiva five years earlier. The US$550,000 advance represented 15 per cent of the publisher’s entire turnover, which came mostly from sales of its three ‘big names’, Stephen King, Harold Bloom and Daniel Goleman. The experts brought in by the firm were unanimous in stating that if The Fifth Mountain were to repeat the success of By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept, Objetiva would get the US$1 million investment back within a matter of months. Apparently the change caused no resentment on the part of his ex-publisher, for although Paulo had moved to Objetiva, he left with Rocco his entire backlist, the profitable collection of seven books published there since 1989. In fact, a month after announcing the move, Paulo Rocco was among the author’s guests at Paulo’s traditional celebration of St Joseph’s feast day on 19 March.
Inspired by a passage from the Bible (1 Kings 18:8–24), The Fifth Mountain tells of the suffering, doubts and spiritual discoveries of the prophet Elijah during his exile in Sarepta in Phoenicia, present-day Lebanon. The city, whose residents were well educated and famous for their commercial acumen, had not known war for 300 years, but it was about to be invaded by the Assyrians. The prophet encounters religious conflicts, and is forced to face the anger both of men and of God. In the prologue, Paulo once again reveals how he interweave
s his personal experiences with the themes of his books. When he states that, with The Fifth Mountain, he had perhaps learned to understand and live with the inevitable, he recalls his dismissal from CBS seventeen years earlier, which had brought to an end a promising career as an executive in the recording industry:
When I finished writing The Fifth Mountain, I recalled that episode–and other manifestations of the unavoidable in my life. Whenever I thought myself the absolute master of a situation, something would happen to cast me down. I asked myself: why? Can it be that I’m condemned to always come close but never to reach the finishing line? Can God be so cruel that He would let me see the palm trees on the horizon only to have me die of thirst in the desert? It took a long time to understand that it wasn’t quite like that. There are things that are brought into our lives to lead us back to the true path of our Personal Legend. Other things arise so we can apply all that we have learned. And, finally, some things come along to teach us.
The book was ready to be delivered to Editora Objetiva when Paulo unearthed information on periods in Elijah’s life that had not been dealt with in the Scriptures, or, more precisely, about the time he had spent in Phoenicia. This exciting discovery meant that he had to rewrite almost the entire book, which was finally published in August 1996 during the fourteenth São Paulo Book Biennial. The launch was preceded by a huge publicity campaign run by the São Paulo agency Salles/DMB&B, whose owner, the advertising executive Mauro Salles, was an old friend and informal guru on marketing matters, and the book’s dedicatee. The campaign included full-page advertisements in the four principal national newspapers (Jornal do Brasil, Folha de São Paulo, O Estado de São Paulo and O Globo) and in the magazines Veja-Rio, Veja-SP, Caras, Claudia and Contigo, 350 posters on Rio and São Paulo buses, eighty hoardings in Rio, and displays, sales points and plastic banners in bookshops. Inspired by Anne Carrière’s idea, which had worked so well in the French launch of The Alchemist, Paulo suggested and Feith ordered a special edition of numbered, autographed copies of The Fifth Mountain to be distributed to 400 bookshops across Brazil a week before the ordinary edition reached the public. In order to prevent any disclosure to the press, every recipient had to sign a confidentiality agreement.
The result was proportionate to the effort invested. The books were distributed on 8 August and in less than twenty-four hours 80,000 of the 100,000 copies of the first edition had been sold. Another 11,000 were sold in the week of the Book Biennial, where seemingly endless queues of readers awaited Paulo and where he signed copies for ten hours non-stop. The Fifth Mountain had barely been out for two months when sales rose to 120,000 copies, meaning that the publisher had already recouped the US$550,000 advance paid to the author. The remaining US$450,000 that had been spent would be recouped during the following months.
In the case of The Fifth Mountain, the critics appeared to be showing signs of softening. ‘Let’s leave it to the magi to judge whether Coelho is a sorcerer or a charlatan, that’s not what matters,’ wrote the Folha de São Paulo. ‘The fact is that he can tell stories that are easily digested, with no literary athletics, and that delight readers in dozens of languages.’ In its main competitor, O Estado de São Paulo, the critic and writer José Castello did not hold back either. ‘The neat, concise style of The Fifth Mountain proves that his pen has grown sharper and more precise,’ he said in his review in the cultural supplement. ‘Whether or not you like his books, Paulo Coelho is still the victim of terrible prejudices–the same […] which, if you transfer them to the religious field, have drowned the planet in blood.’ A week before the launch, even the irascible Veja seemed to have bowed to the evidence and devoted a long and sympathetic article to him, entitled ‘The Smile of the Magus’, at the end of which it published an exclusive excerpt from The Fifth Mountain. However, in the middle of this torrent of praise, the magazine summarized the content of Coelho’s work as ‘ingenuous stories whose “message” usually has all the philosophical depth of a Karate Kid film’.
At the following launch, however, when Manual do Guerreiro da Luz, or Manual of the Warrior of Light, came out, the critics returned with renewed appetite. This was the first of Paulo’s books to be published abroad before coming out in Brazil, and was the result of a suggestion from Elisabetta Sgarbi, of the Italian publisher Bompiani. Encouraged by the success of the author’s books in Italy, she went to Mônica to see whether he might have any unpublished work for the Assagi collection, which Bompiani had just created. Coelho had for some time been thinking of collecting together various notes and reflections recorded over the years into one book, and this was perhaps the right moment. Some of these had already been published in the Folha de São Paulo, and this led him to stick to the same eleven-line limit imposed by the newspaper. Using metaphors, symbolism and religious and medieval references, Paulo reveals to readers his experiences during what he calls ‘my process of spiritual growth’. In his view, the Manual was such a fusion between author and work that it became the ‘key book’ to understanding his universe. ‘Not so much the world of magic, but above all the ideological world,’ he says. ‘Manual of the Warrior of Light has the same importance for me as the Red Book had for Mao or the Green Book for Gaddafi.’ The term ‘Warrior of Light’–someone who is always actively trying to realize his dream, regardless of what obstacles are placed in his way–can be found in several of his books, including The Alchemist, The Valkyries and By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept. And should there remain any doubts as to its meaning, the home page of the author’s then recently created website took on the task of responding to those doubts: ‘This book brings together a series of texts written to remind us that in every one of us there is a Warrior of Light. Someone capable of listening to the silence of his heart, of accepting defeats without allowing himself to be weakened by them and of nourishing hope in the midst of dejection and fatigue.’
When it was launched in Brazil, the Manual was preceded by the success of the book in Italy, but this did not seem to impress the Brazilian critics–not even the Folha de São Paulo, which had originally published several of the mini-articles reproduced in the book. In a short, two-column review, the young journalist Fernando Barros e Silva, one of the newspaper’s editors, referred to the launch as ‘the most recent mystical spasm from our greatest publishing phenomenon’ and dismissed the author in the first lines of his article:
Paulo Coelho is not a writer, not even a lousy writer. There’s no point in calling what he does ‘subliterature’. That would be praise indeed. His model is more Edir Macedo [the ‘bishop’ of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God] than Sidney Sheldon. […] Having said that, let us turn to the book itself. There is nothing new. The secret, as ever, lies in lining up platitudes so that the reader can read what best suits him. As with the I Ching, this is about ‘illuminating’ routes, ‘suggesting’ truths by using vague metaphors, sentences that are so cloudy and surrounded by metaphysical smoke that they are capable of saying everything precisely because they say absolutely nothing. […] Every cliché fits into this successful formula: an ecological and idyllic description of nature, allusions to interminable conflicts between good and evil, touches of Christian guilt and redemption–all stitched together in a flat, unpolished language that seems to be the work of an eight-year-old child and is aimed at people of the same mental age. Each time you read Paulo Coelho, even with care and attention, you become more stupid and worse than you were before.
Such reviews only proved to the author the tiresome and repetitive abyss that separated the views of the critics from the behaviour of his readers. As had been the case since his very first book–and as would be the case with the rest–despite being ridiculed in newspapers such as the Folha de São Paulo, the Manual appeared a few days later in all the best-seller lists. Paulo went on to achieve something that probably no other author ever had: being number one in best-seller lists of both non-fiction (in this case in O Globo) and fiction (in the Jornal do Brasil). Things were no d
ifferent in the rest of the world: the Manual was translated into twenty-nine languages, and in Italy it sold more than a million copies, becoming, after The Alchemist and Eleven Minutes, the most successful of the author’s books there–and a decade after its launch by Bompiani it still had an average sale of 100,000 copies a year. Its popularity in Italy became such that at the end of 1997, the designer Donatella Versace announced that her collection for 1998 had taken its inspiration from Coelho’s book. In France, The Alchemist had sold two million copies and By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept 240,000, which led Anne Carrière to buy the publishing rights to The Fifth Mountain for US$150,000. Some months before, the author had been overwhelmed to receive from the French government the title of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. ‘You are an alchemist for millions of readers who say that you write books that do good,’ the French Minister of Culture, Philippe Douste-Blazy, said as he presented him with the medal. ‘Your books do good because they stimulate our power to dream, our desire to seek and to believe in that search.’
Some Brazilians, however, continued to turn their noses up at their compatriot, for whom the red carpet was rolled out wherever he walked. This attitude was made even more explicit at the beginning of 1998, when it was announced that Brazil was to be guest of honour at the 18th Salon du Livre de Paris to be held between 19 and 25 March that year. The Brazilian Minister of Culture, Francisco Weffort, had given the president of the National Library, the academic Eduardo Portela, the task of organizing the group of writers who would take part in the event as guests of the Brazilian government. Following several weeks of discussion, only ten days before the event the press received the list of the fifty authors who were to spend a week in Paris. Exactly as had happened four years earlier in Frankfurt, Paulo Coelho’s name was not among those invited. It was a pointless insult by a government that the author had supported. Invited, instead, by his publisher, he spent the afternoon of the opening day signing copies of the French translation of The Fifth Mountain, which had an initial run of 250,000 copies (hardly too many for someone who had already sold five million books in France).
Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life Page 46
