Entrapped in Coelho’s Magic
By Kadri Kousaar. Translated by Jurgen Kaljuvee

Paulo Coelho coolly observes his surroundings from a chair in a hotel lobby. He is modest in his general demeanor, but once in a while he exhibits unusual strength, influence, even magic. This mystical charisma is probably derived from his down-to-earth attitude towards life: he has been equally happy working as a waiter in a Polish restaurant, participating in an Estonian language lesson in a village in Estonia, helping Brazilian street children with tens of thousands of dollars, and visiting the most underground night clubs in Paris.

Coelho prays three times a day and performs rituals whose meaning he does not explain. Still, his behavior does not appear at all strange. It is in fact charming to see him wrapped in an orange scarf casting magical spells on his books at a small book store in a faraway Nordic country.

The dedications he writes to his books when signing them usually say something like: “Love is a journey”, “Observe signs!”, and “Find your inner magician!” To a cynic, these statements might seem naïve, but to Coelho, life reaffirms the fact that simple rules work.

	Paulo Coelho's Website

“You have been translated into 56 languages and there are over 37 million copies of your books sold worldwide. Clearly you have conquered the hearts of your readers. But have you ever been tempted to conquer the hearts of your critics as well?
I have never had such plans and hardly ever will. I cannot understand when people measure things on based on their degree of complexity. In my opinion, books such as Ulysses by James Joyce, and especially Finnegan’s Wake, are poor books because they have been made complex artistically.

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco was a good book but Foucault’s Pendulum by the same author was, shall we say, horrific at best, because it was written not in language but in code. By the same token, Nabokov’s Lolita is so much more powerful than his other works because it is his most heartfelt and painful book; it was not constructed.

The form of art, as opposed to the content, is heavily overemphasized in today’s literature. It is like some sort of general fashion in which people forget heart and character. The form, or the language, is after all simply a vehicle for passing on ideas. What is the point in describing things in illusory formalism? No point.

My experience as a writer has been that one should never listen to critics. If an author begins to align him or herself according to critics, he or she will be gone. Take for instance Jostein Gaarder. Sophie’s World is a wonderful book, but soon enough Gaarder began to align himself according to critics and eventually he lost both his critics and readers.

When The Alchemist first came out, it sold so poorly that my publisher was about to cancel the contract. But the entire success of The Alchemist is based on the initial nine hundred readers who bought the book and began recommending it to their friends. The advertising for this book was done by word of mouth, not by critics.

I really do not understand why things need to be overly complex. I am a big fan of the Japanese shibumi lifestyle. It is very simple, but extremely elegant. Universities are full of experts who busy themselves with meaningless activities. Regrettably, so many people dedicate their entire lives to trying to prove that they are intelligent. I do not understand why.

Would you ever admit to having simplified things for a lay reader?
No, certainly not. It is only important to tell the whole story, the rest will follow. The highest pleasure that one can derive from writing is when one is talking to one’s soul.

What would you recommend to a young writer?
Not to take notes. When I look at young authors, I see that they are constantly taking notes. When I have completed a book, I do not prepare for my next book for at least two years. In the meantime, I simply live, travel, relate to people. My next book is traveling with me, but not actively or consciously.

Taking notes is equivalent to diluting ideas – the moment of writing something down for the first time is the most authentic, magical, and the most powerful moment. You sit by your computer and let your ideas fly freely, and what comes is exactly what has to come. All inessential has been erased from your memory.

And this also implies that one should not do what one would not ordinarily do only for the sake of writing. The most important thing is to be able to connect imagination with authenticity.

One has to be patient towards success. By the way, I do not see much difference whether one is a writer in Brazil or, say, in Estonia, although there are 170 million times more people speaking Portuguese. For some reason, literary success always begins only after being translated to English.

If you were not a writer, what would you do?
Truthfully speaking there is no such word for me as “if”. I always dreamt of becoming a writer, and I did become one. When I was about your age- that is, about twenty- a friend of mine told me a story about Wagner. He was once arrested and humiliated by the police. He screamed at the police, “You just watch, some day I will be a famous man!”

I told my friend, “You just watch, some day I will be a famous man, too!” My friend took this as a joke, but I was not joking. Oh well, it is not entire inappropriate of me to tell this story now [laughs].

Have you ever felt that happy people cannot create anything memorable or profound, only unhappy people can do that?
That is the way it is apparently. I am not happy either. In my opinion, happiness is such an absolute concept that one cannot say that one is “a little” happy. One can only be either happy or unhappy. By my very character, I have always been trying and fighting, I have never been satisfied.

On the other hand, I rarely experience the feeling we call sorrow. I feel anger, joy, love, nervousness – any of these – but not sorrow. I am optimistic by nature, and I do not begin worrying before I really need to worry. My favorite people are those who possess a certain degree of insanity. Yes, we can say that – those who are sufficiently courageous and insane to engage in all but unimaginable actions and experiments, while still maintaining some sense of reality.

Let us suppose that you have a friend who on his death bed hands you a manuscript that he asks you never to publish. You read it, and it turns out to be a very good book. Would you publish the manuscript?
Under no circumstances. The wish of a dead person is a law. By the way, I already have a will which prohibits publishing any of my writings after my death which were not handed to the publisher personally by me.

Do you think that the contemporary world is excessively obsessed with money and sex?
I really think so. My most recent book Eleven Minutes talks about sex and myths surrounding it. For example, I think that vaginal orgasm does not exist. And although people try to measure everything in money, it still remains a taboo. If you ask someone, “How much money do you have in your account?” or “How much do you make?” they will generally consider your questions wildly impolite.

I understand that one need not to talk about these things on TV shows or in newspaper interviews, but there is no reason why one should hide when among one’s close friends.

Your favorite writer, Jorge Luis Borges, wrote a poem about what he would have done differently in his life had he a chance to repeat it. For instance, he would eat less beans and more ice cream. What would you have done differently in your life?
By and large, my life unraveled for me as I wished. If I could rewind time, I would try to avoid hurting anyone. Apparently, I have hurt a few people in my life. But I would keep my wounds and scars because they have helped me most in my development. By the way, the poem you mentioned, “Moments”, is not by Borges, although it has been published under his name. There is a lot of stuff circulating under my name which I have not written. Some of which, by the way, is quite good.