Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life (48 page)

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: