Descripción
Libro Aleph (libro en inglés). Sinopsis libro, reseña libro. Transform your life. Rewrite your destiny. In his most personal novel to date, internationally bestselling author Paulo Coelho returns with a remarkable journey of self-discovery. Like the main character in his much-beloved The Alchemist, Paulo is facing a grave crisis of faith. As he seeks a path of spiritual renewal and growth, his only real option is to begin again–to travel, to experiment, to reconnect with people and the landscapes around him. Setting off to Africa, and then to Europe and Asia via the Trans-Siberian railroad, he initiates a journey to revitalize his energy and passion. Even so, he never expects to meet Hilal. A gifted young violinist, she is the woman Paulo loved five hundred years before–and the woman he betrayed in an act of cowardice so far-reaching that it prevents him from finding real happiness in this life. Together they will initiate a mystical voyage through time and space, traveling a path that teaches love, forgiveness, and the courage to overcome life’s inevitable challenges. Beautiful and inspiring, Aleph invites us to consider the meaning of our own personal journeys. Libro Aleph (libro en inglés).
william –
This book was deeply disappointing and left me feeling very uneasy about the author.
It it the first book I’ve read by Coelho, and I my expectations were high. The premise was interesting – a sense of spiritual dissatisfaction propelling the author to undertake a series of journeys to unexplored places, meeting his readers. Unfortunately, there were no deep spiritual insights on display, only yet another banal late middle-age crisis involving a young woman.
The book centers around Coelho’s journey to Russia where he meets Hilal – a young, beautiful Russian woman, who believes she has a very strong spiritual connection with him, is clearly infatuated with him and is also a great fan of his work.
Coelho explains how Hilal more or less forces herself into his inner traveling circle, describing her as a bit unstable and pitiful. This is a very convenient description, given that a week or so he later finds himself sleeping with her while traveling through Siberia by train – I guess she «forced» herself upon him.
Throughout the book he belittles his nymphette traveling companion by ignoring her, brashly dismissing her attempts at initiating spiritual rituals (apparently this is something only Coelho or shamans can do), almost leaving her destitute at the end of the journey, and then making a point of telling us that a) she flies in economy back to Moscow while he flies in first, b) he has only had email contact with her once since the journey ended. All the while, he claims that he viciously betrayed her 500 years ago, leaving her to be tortured and burned as a witch. He clearly has learned very little during the past 500 years, because his public humiliation of her throughout the book is really just another form of betrayal. Coelho does seems to have quite enjoyed her sleeping naked with him on the trans-siberian express and playing violin naked for him as well. To me it came across another middle-aged sex-tourist in Russia justifying his licentious and arrogant behaviour with a very thin past-life cover story.