Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life

by Fernando Morais

  In fact, the author had arrived in Paris a week before the Brazilian delegation and been faced with a plethora of interviews with newspapers, magazines and no fewer than six different French television programmes. Finally, on 19 March, to the sound of a noisy Brazilian percussion group, President Jacques Chirac and the Brazilian First Lady, who was representing her husband, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, officially declared the salon open and, surrounded by a crowd of journalists and security guards, walked along some of the aisles down the centre of the Paris Expo convention centre where the event was being held. At one point, to the dismay of the Brazilian contingent, President Chirac made a point of going over to the Éditions Anne Carrière stand, shook hands with the publisher and, with an enormous smile on his face, warmly embraced Paulo Coelho. He heaped praise on, as it was later discovered, the only Brazilian author he had read and on whom, two years later, he would bestow the Légion d’Honneur–an honour previously given to such international celebrities as Winston Churchill, John Kennedy and even some famous Brazilians, such as Santos Dumont, Pelé and Oscar Niemeyer. Before moving on, Chirac then turned to Anne Carrière, saying: ‘You must have made a lot of money with Monsieur Coelho’s books. Congratulations!’

  The following day, the Salon du Livre de Paris opened to the public and was witness to another world record: an author signing autographs for seven hours non-stop apart from short trips to the toilet or to smoke a cigarette. However, the best was yet to come for Anne Carrière. Some days before the close of the event, she took over the Carrousel du Louvre, an elegant, exclusive gallery beneath the famous Paris museum where shows were held by the famous European fashion houses. There Paulo hosted a banquet to which he invited booksellers, publishers, journalists and famous intellectuals. Throwing down the gauntlet to those who had snubbed him, the host made sure that every member of the Brazilian delegation received a personal invitation to the dinner. One of these was the journalist and writer Zuenir Ventura, who had just published a book entitled, appropriately enough, Inveja [Envy]. He recalled Paulo’s concern that the Brazilians were being well looked after: ‘He didn’t eat, he went round to every table. Although at the time, he had everyone who mattered in the literary world at his feet, Paulo was exactly the same person as ever. When he came to my table, instead of talking about himself, he wanted to know how my book Inveja was going, whether I had any translation offers, whether he could help…’

  When it came to the time for toasts, the author asked the band to stop playing for a while so that he could speak. Visibly moved and speaking in good French, he thanked everyone for being there, heaped praise on his Brazilian colleagues and dedicated the evening to one absentee: ‘I should like this night of celebration to be an homage from all of us to the greatest and best of all Brazilian writers, my dear friend Jorge Amado, to whom I ask you all to raise your glasses.’

  Then, to the sound of Brazilian music, the 600 guests turned the hallowed marble rooms of the Carrousel into a dance floor and danced the samba into the early hours. On their return to the hotel, Paulo had yet another surprise: a special edition of The Fifth Mountain, produced for the occasion. Each book in its own velvet case contained the same sentence, written in French and signed by the author: ‘Perseverance and spontaneity are the paradoxical conditions of the personal legend.’ When Paulo boarded the plane back to Brazil, three weeks after landing in Paris, 200,000 copies of The Fifth Mountain had been bought by the French public.

  Now firmly and comfortably established as one of the most widely sold authors in the world, Paulo Coelho became an object of interest in the academic world. One of the first essayists to turn his attention to his work was Professor Mario Maestri of the University of Passo Fundo, in Rio Grande do Sul, the author of a study in 1993 in which he had recognized that Coelho’s books ‘belong by right to the national literary-fictional corpus’. Six years later, however, when he published his book Why Paulo Coelho Is Successful, Maestri seems to have been infected by the ill will of literary critics:

  Replete with proverbs, aphorisms and simplistic stories, full of commonplaces and clichés, Paulo Coelho’s early fiction nevertheless has an important role in self-help. It allows readers demoralized by a wretched day-to-day existence to dream of achieving happiness swiftly and as if by magic. The worn-out modern esoteric suggests to his readers easy ways–within the reach of all–of taking positive action in their own lives and in the world, usually in order to gain material and personal advantage. It is essentially a magical route to the virtual universe of a consumer society.

  The many MA and PhD theses being written throughout the country confirmed that, apart from a few exceptions, Brazilian universities were as hostile towards the writer as the Brazilian media. This feeling became public in a report published in the Jornal do Brasil in 1998, in which the newspaper described the experience of Otacília Rodrigues de Freitas, literature professor at the University of São Paulo, who had faced fierce criticism when she defended a doctoral thesis entitled ‘A best-seller from the reader’s point of view: The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho’–a thesis considered by her colleagues to be sympathetic towards the author. The professor told the Jornal do Brasil indignantly: ‘They said that Paulo Coelho had paid me to write the thesis, that I was his mistress.’

  Indifferent to what academics might think of his work, Paulo was preparing once again to face the whirlwind of activity that now accompanied the launch of each new book. Set in Slovenia, the story of Veronika Decide Morrer, or Veronika Decides to Die, has as its backdrop the romance between Eduard, the son of a diplomat, and the eponymous heroine who, after attempting suicide, is placed in a mental asylum by her parents and subjected to brutal electroshock treatment. The explosive nature of the book lay in Paulo’s revelation that he had been admitted to the Dr Eiras clinic in Rio during the 1960s on three separate occasions, something he had never spoken about in public before. By doing so, he was breaking an oath he had made that he would deal with the subject in public only after the death of his parents. His mother had died five years earlier, in 1993, of complications arising from Alzheimer’s disease, and he had been unable to be at her funeral because he received the news while he was in Canada, working on the launch of The Alchemist, and was unable to get back to Brazil in time. Although his energetic father, Pedro, was not only alive but, as he appears in the book, ‘in full enjoyment of his mental faculties and his health’, Veronika Decides to Die exposes in no uncertain terms the violence to which the author was subjected by his father and his late mother. ‘Veronika is Paulo Coelho’, the author declared to whoever wanted to listen.

  Concerned as always that his books should reach poorer readers, this time he decided to change his launch tactics. He told Objetiva to cut by half the US$450,000 spent on advertising The Fifth Mountain, thus allowing a reduction of almost 25 per cent on the cover price. Another move intended to make his work more accessible was a contract with the supermarket chain Carrefour, which included Veronika in its promotional package of presents for Father’s Day. The book’s publication coincided with an intense debate in Brazil about the treatment of people being held in public and private mental asylums. The Senate was discussing a bill drawn up to bring about the gradual eradication of institutions where patients with mental problems were held as virtual prisoners, and during that debate, passages of Veronika were read out. On the day on which the vote was to be held and the law ratified, Senator Eduardo Suplicy quoted from a letter he had received from Paulo Coelho in praise of the bill: ‘Having been a victim in the past of the violence of these baseless admissions to mental hospitals–I was committed to the Casa de Saúde Dr Eiras in 1965, ’66 and ’67–I see this new law not only as opportune, but as absolutely necessary.’ Together with the letter the author sent a copy of the records of his admissions to the clinic. Two years later, Paulo was invited to join the team of the International Russell Tribunal on Psychiatry, an institution created by the European Parliament, and in 2003, he was one of the speakers
at a seminar on the Protection and Promotion of the Rights of Persons with Mental Health Problems organized by the European Committee on Human Rights.

  Veronika broke all Paulo’s previous records. What was new was the respectful treatment accorded to the book by the media. Perhaps moved by the shocking revelations contained in the book, the newspapers and magazines devoted pages and pages to accounts of the horror of his three internments.

  One of the few dissenting voices was that of a friend of his, the writer and journalist Marcelo Rubem Paiva. Asked by the Folha de São Paulo to review Veronika, he did so tongue in cheek and even suggested stylistic changes to the text, only to pull himself up short: ‘What am I saying? Here I am giving tips to a writer who has sold millions and won commendations and prizes abroad!’

  Exactly. To judge by all those sales, prizes and commendations, it would seem that his readers preferred his texts as they were. Immediately following the publication of Veronika in Brazil, the journalist and professor Denis de Moraes published an essay entitled The Big Four. These were Stephen King, Michael Crichton, John Grisham and Tom Clancy. Moraes used a list of Paulo’s achievements and engagements in 1998 to show that the Brazilian already had a foot in that select group of world best-sellers:

  He spoke about spirituality at the Economic Forum in Davos, in Switzerland.

  He was granted an audience at the Vatican and blessed by Pope John Paul II.

  He beat the world record for a book signing at the eighteenth Salon du Livre de Paris with The Fifth Mountain, which has sold almost 300,000 copies in France.

  He recorded a statement for the documentary The Phenomenon, based on his life, for a Canadian/French/American co-production.

  His book Manual of the Warrior of Light inspired the 1998/1999 Versace collection.

  He spent a week in Britain publicizing The Fifth Mountain.

  On his return to Rio de Janeiro in May, he gave interviews to the Canadian TV5 and to the English newspapers the Sunday Times and the Guardian.

  Between August and October, he undertook engagements in New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Israel and Yugoslavia.

  He returned to Rio for interviews with French and German television, before setting off for a series of launches in Eastern Europe (Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia and Bulgaria).

  Before returning to Brazil for the end-of-year festivities he went to Finland and Russia.

  Hollywood wants to adapt four of his books for the cinema.

  The French actress Isabelle Adjani is fighting Julia Roberts for the film rights to By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept.

  The Arenas Group, with links to Sony Entertainment, wants to bring The Valkyries to the screen, while Virgin is interested in The Pilgrimage.

  Awarded the Ordem do Rio Branco by President Fernando Henrique Cardoso.

  Named special UN envoy for the Spiritual Convergence and Intercultural Dialogue programme.

  All this feverish travelling was interrupted only in 2000, when he finished his new book, O Demónio e a Srta. Prym, or The Devil and Miss Prym. The launch this time was rather different. Firstly, the author decided to stay at home (the book was launched simultaneously in Brazil and other countries), preferring to receive foreign journalists in his new apartment in Copacabana. This was an apartment occupying an entire floor, which he had transformed into a vast bedroom-cum-sitting room, for which he had paid about US$350,000 and from where he enjoyed a wonderful view of Brazil’s most famous beach. The idea of asking journalists to come to him had arisen some weeks earlier, when the North American television network CNN International recorded a long interview with him that was shown in 230 countries.

  During the weeks that followed, at the invitation of his agent, teams from all the major newspapers and television stations began to arrive in Rio from Germany, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Spain, France, Greece, England, Italy, Mexico, Portugal and the Czech Republic. Many used the trip to Brazil to file reports on Rio de Janeiro as well, and Mônica commented: ‘That amount of publicity would have cost the Prefecture of Rio a fortune.’ The other unusual thing about the launch in Brazil was the choice of venue. Coelho preferred to hold it in the Brazilian Academy of Letters. You didn’t have to be very sharp to guess what this choice meant: Paulo Coelho, who had been so mistreated by Brazilian critics, clearly had his eye on a seat in the Olympus of Brazilian literature.

  CHAPTER 28

  Becoming an ‘immortal’

  THE DEVIL AND MISS PRYM was not the book Coelho had wanted to publish at the turn of the millennium. He had written a novel about sex, which had been carefully checked by Mônica and a friend of the author, the theologian and ex-impresario Chico Castro Silva, but it did not survive Chris’s reading of it, and, as with his book on satanism, she refused to give it her approval.

  This was not the first time he had been down this route. At the end of the 1980s, a little after publishing The Alchemist in Brazil, he had tried to write a book in which he treated sex with a starkness rarely found in literature. Between January and March 1989, he produced a 100-page novel telling the story of a man who is identified simply as ‘D.’, with the book being given the provisional title A Magia do Sexo, A Glória de Deus [The Magic of Sex, The Glory of God] or, simply, Conversas com D.[Conversations with D].

  Tormented by doubts about his sexuality, the main character is only able to find sexual satisfaction with his wife, but has terrible dreams in which he sees his mother naked and being abused by several men who, having raped her, urinate over her. What troubles the forty-year-old D. is not just the nightmare in itself but also the fact that witnessing this violence gives him pleasure. Lost in the midst of these terrible fantasies, D. starts to tell his problems to a friend, who becomes the narrator of the plot. The two meet every evening for a beer. As he describes his innermost secrets and insecurities, D. ends up confessing that, although he is not homosexual, he experiences enormous pleasure when dreaming that he is being raped by men (‘I like the humiliation of being on all fours, submissive, giving pleasure to the other man’). Coelho never finished Conversas com D., and it ends without one knowing what fate the author will choose for the central character–whose story bears a certain resemblance to his own. The book ended up in the trunk full of diaries that Coelho had said should be burned after his death.

  The Devil and Miss Prym arose from a visit Coelho made to the French town of Viscos, on the Spanish frontier. In the main square, he saw a strange sculpture in which the water flowed out of a sun and into the mouth of a toad, and, however much he quizzed the inhabitants, no one could explain to him the significance of this odd creation. The image remained in his head for months, until he decided to use it as a representation of Good and Evil. With The Devil and Miss Prym, Coelho was completing a trilogy that he called ‘And on the Seventh Day’, which began with By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept (1994) and was followed by Veronika (1998). According to him, ‘they are three books that describe a week in the life of normal people who suddenly find themselves confronted by love, death and power’.

  The story takes place in a small imaginary village of 281 inhabitants, all of whom are believed to be extremely honest. The village routine is interrupted by the arrival of Carlos, a foreigner who is at once identified by the widow Berta, the eldest of the inhabitants, as someone bringing evil to their peaceful town, i.e., the Devil. The stranger stays in a hotel where the only single woman in town, Chantal Prym, works in the snack bar. Miss Prym is an orphan and rather frowned on by the other inhabitants, and she is chosen by the visitor as an instrument to test their honesty. Presenting himself as a businessman who has lost his wife and two daughters to a dreadful crime, the mysterious Carlos offers the young woman the chance to become rich and leave the tedious life of the town. In exchange, she must help him to convince the local inhabitants to take part in a macabre competition: if, within a week, someone can commit the motiveless murder of at least one local inhabitant, the town will receive ten bars of
gold which he has hidden in a secret place. The book deals with the conflicts generated by this extraordinary offer and concludes by identifying the possible simultaneous existence within every human soul of a personal angel and a personal devil.

  In March 2000, after delivering The Devil and Miss Prym to Editora Objetiva, Paulo took a plane to Paris in time to see the start of the huge publicity campaign organized by Anne Carrière for the launch of Veronika Decides to Die. On a cold, grey Monday morning, along with the millions of Parisians and tourists who daily cross the city, he was shown a number 87 bus bearing a gigantic close-up of his face printed against a blue backdrop, announcing that Veronika was in all the bookshops. The number 87 buses departed from Porte de Reuilly, to the east of the capital, and travelled some 30 kilometres through the streets until reaching their final stop in Champs de Mars, having passed through some of the busiest areas of Paris, such as Gare de Lyon, the Bastille and St Germain-des-Près. The same scene was being repeated in fourteen other French cities. This time, however, the publicity campaign did not produce the hoped-for results. The reaction of French readers was lukewarm, perhaps because they found it odd to see a book being advertised like soap or toothpaste. Although it sold more than the previous books, the sales of Veronika in France were below expectations. Even so, the book was warmly received by the French press, including L’Express and the serious and conservative Figaro, one of the most influential newspapers in the country. At the same time, although without the same fanfare, Veronika was beginning to arrive in bookshops in Taiwan, Japan, China, Indonesia, Thailand and the United States.