Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life (50 page)

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 Encouraged by the success of the author’s books in Italy, she went to Mônica to see whether he might have any unpublished work for the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:

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 different
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).

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:

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.’