The Worst Book Ever

Dear Mr. Coelho:

Here at Recharger The Dog, we have a rule: never read a bestseller recommended by more than one person.

Ignoring our own advice, we started The Alchemist with trepidation. It began with a cliché that we’ve come to detest—the uneducated working class lad who secretly reads Big Books. This sappy device was used by James Jones in From Here to Eternity (Pruitt, the reluctant boxer or trumpeter—can’t remember which—has a list of Big Books stashed in his pocket), nearly ruining that novel. In The Alchemist, the shepherd is a deep thinking reader searching for his “Personal Legend.” What that phrase means, we cannot, without the aid of LSD, say.

Anyway, after about 20 pages, we realized this was not just a bad book, or even a very bad book, it was a book of such horrific badness, such poor writing and story-telling and, above all, such monumental VAPIDITY, that it makes the Berenstain Bears look like The Odyssey, it makes Jonathan Livingston Seagull look like the Book of Job; it makes The Kite Runner look like Lolita, it makes Manischewitz look like wine.

Don’t believe us? We give you two excerpts (more than that and you will run screaming into traffic). Here is the alchemist, the shallowest wise man in the history of literature, telling the boy to leave Fatima, the oasis girl he’s just met and fallen in lust with at first sight:

You must understand that love never keeps a man from pursuing his Personal Legend. If he abandons that pursuit, it’s because it wasn’t true love…the love that speaks the Language of the World.

What the annoyingly capitalized “Personal Legend” and “Language of the World” mean is never explained. They just sound important, in a way that appeals to 14-year-olds. Indeed, every one and everything the boy meets speaks the “Language of the World.” And, given the radiactive vagueness in nearly every one of the books sentences, the Language of the World–though Recharger doesn’t speak it himself–must have been invented by presidential speech-writers. Take the above paragraph. What is it about? Does it mean we should ditch the chicks we fall for, and if they don’t understand—too fucking bad?

Another Coelho mantra goes like this:

If a man seeks his Personal Legend, then the whole universe conspires to help him.

Uh, Paulo, this doesn’t explain all the people that have died with broken dreams. But who cares? This is not supposed to be a serious book. It’s a book English teachers— the ones who never read any books themselves—assign their students. Over and over, what is supposed to pass for wisdom in The Alchemist is the acme, the paragon, the Mt. Everest, of drivel.

Here, for example, the alchemist is telling the boy not to worry about leaving Fatima back at the oasis:

If what one finds is made of pure matter, it will never spoil. And one can always comes back. If what you had found was only a moment of light, like the explosion of a star, you would find nothing on your return.

Last time I looked, fish is pure matter–and it spoils pretty damn fast. But who cares? The whole book is like that—paragraph after fast-food paragraph, for 169 pages, the longest book ever written. A literary 9/11. That metaphor, we do not lightly use. If this is what people are reading and—judging by the rave reviews on Amazon.com—thinking is an important book, then there is no hope for humanity. No wonder the majority of Americans  think Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks; no wonder most Americans don’t believe in Darwin’s theories of adaptation; no wonder most Americans think Friends is funny. Taste, intelligence, literature, nuance–the joy and pain that have inspired philosophers and theologians–are dead.