“Eleven Minutes,” a novel, published in 2003, about a Brazilian prostitute in Geneva, is an exception in that it also has a “hymn to Isis” found at Nag Hammadi.

Many of his books begin with a prayer to Mary and an epigraph from the Gospel according to Luke. Quotidian events, like weather and coincidence, he sees as miraculous.

His cosmology, which includes angels and devils, signs, omens, and, for each person, a destiny called his Personal Legend, promises that whatever is sought-love, money, inspiration-can be readily attained. Bellboys, waitresses, and policemen recognize his face in the aftermath of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, President Clinton was photographed carrying a copy of “The Alchemist.” In his writings, Coelho, who is Catholic-though he says he does not “kiss the hand of the Pope, that’s for sure”-presents himself as a searcher and a sage, a hybrid of Carlos Castaneda and Kahlil Gibran. They have sold nearly a hundred million copies. A movie version, which is expected to go into production next year, will star Laurence Fishburne, who wrote the script and who will also direct, as the alchemist.Ĭoelho’s books include eight novels, two memoirs, several collections of occasional writing, a volume of quotations, and “Warrior of the Light: A Manual,” a book of platitudes. “The Alchemist” has been translated into sixty-four languages and has sold more than twenty million copies. The boy is overjoyed and returns to the church, where he unearths a chest of gold coins. The thieves leave the boy for dead, and their leader, as a final insult, tells him that he, too, has had a recurring dream about buried treasure-his is in an abandoned church in Spain-but is not so stupid as to have believed it. He sells his flock and buys a ticket to Tangier, and in the desert meets an alchemist, from whom he learns that “wherever your heart is, that is where you’ll find your treasure.” When the boy reaches the Pyramids and starts digging, a band of thieves attacks him, even as he explains that he’s searching for gold revealed to him in a dream. In Coelho’s telling, the protagonist is an Andalusian shepherd boy (Coelho says that he is that shepherd boy) who, bedding down with his flock in an abandoned church, dreams of finding a fortune at the Pyramids, in Egypt. It is a story, told in “ A Thousand and One Nights” and in Rumi’s “Masnavi” and later adapted by Jorge Luis Borges-the version that Coelho, who is Brazilian, first read-of a man who dreams that he must leave home to find a treasure and, upon arriving at his destination, discovers that the treasure is in fact buried in his native land. Paulo Coelho wrote “The Alchemist” in two weeks, in 1987. Coelho has sold nearly a hundred million books.

Novel the magus