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Paulo
Coelho was born in 1947 into a middle-class family, the son of Pedro, an
engineer, and Lygia, a housewife.
At seven, he entered
the Jesuit school of San Ignacio in Rio de Janeiro. Paulo came to detest
the obligatory nature of religious practice. However, although he hated
praying and going to mass, there were compensations. In the school's
austere corridors, Paulo discovered his true vocation: to be a writer.
He won his first literary prize in a school poetry competition.
However, Paulo's
parents had very different plans for their son's future. They wanted him
to be an engineer and tried to stifle his desires to devote himself to
literature. Their intransigence and his discovery of Henry Miller's
Tropic of Cancer aroused Paulo's spirit of rebellion, and he began
routinely to flout the family rules. His father took this behaviour as a
sign of mental illness and, when Paulo was seventeen, he twice had him
committed to a psychiatric hospital, where Paulo underwent several
sessions of electroconvulsive therapy.
Shortly after this,
Paulo became involved with a theatre group and began working as a
journalist. In the eyes of the comfortably-off middle classes of the
time, the theatre was a hotbed of immorality. His frightened parents
decided to break their promise not to confine him again and hat him
readmitted to hospital for the third time. When he came out, Paulo was
even more lost and more enclosed in his own private world. In despair,
the family called in another doctor who told them: Paulo isn't mad and
he shouldn't be in a psychiatric hospital. He simply has to learn how to
face up to life. Thirty years after these experiences, Paulo Coelho
wrote Veronika Decides to Die.
After this period,
Paulo returned to his studies and it looked as if he was finally going
to follow the route his parents had prepared for him. Not long
afterwards, though, he dropped out and went back to the theatre. This
was in the sixties, and the hippie movement had exploded onto the world
scene. These new trends took root even in Brazil, ruled at the time by a
repressive military regime. Paulo wore his hair long and made a point of
never carrying his identity card; for a time, he took drugs, wanting to
live the hippie experience to the full. His passion for writing drove
him to start a magazine, of which only two issues were ever published.
Around this time, the
musician and composer, Raul Seixas invited Paulo to write the words to
his songs. Their second record was a huge success and sold more than
500,000 copies. This was the first time Paulo had earned a large amount
of money. Their partnership continued up until 1976. Paulo wrote more
than sixty songs with Raul Seixas, and together they changed the
Brazilian rock scene.
In 1973, Paulo and Raul
became part of the Alternative Society, an organization that opposed
capitalist ideology, defended the individual's right to do what he or
she pleased, and also practised black magic. He later described these
experiences in The Valkyries (1992).
During this period,
they began publishing "Kring-ha", a series of comic strips,
calling for more freedom. The dictatorship considered these subversive,
and Paulo and Raul were detained and imprisoned. Raul was soon released,
but Paulo was kept in for longer because he was considered to be the 'brains'
behind the comic strips. His problems did not end there however; two
days after his release, Paulo was seized as he was walking down the
street and taken to a military torture centre where he remained for
several days. According to him, he only escaped death by telling them
that he was mad and had already been admitted to mental hospitals three
times. He started physically harming himself when his kidnappers were
there in the room, and, in the end, they stopped torturing him and let
him go.
This experience marked
him deeply. At twenty-six, Paulo decided that he had had enough
experience of 'life' and wanted to be 'normal'. He got a job at the
record company, Polygram, where he met the woman who would later become
his wife.
In 1977, they moved to
London. Paulo bought a typewriter and started writing, without much
success. The following year, he returned to Brazil, where he worked as
an executive for another record company, CBS. This only lasted three
months, after which he separated from his wife and left his job.
In 1979, he met up with
an old friend, Christina Oiticica, whom he would later marry and with
whom he still lives.
The couple travelled to
Europe where they visited several countries. In Germany they went to the
concentration camp at Dachau. There Paulo had a vision in which a man
appeared to him. Two months later, he met that same man in a café in
Amsterdam and spent a long time talking to him and exchanging views and
experiences. The man, whose identity Paulo has never revealed, suggested
that he should return to Catholicism. Paulo started studying the
symbolic language of Christianity. He also proposed that Paulo should
walk the Road to Santiago (a medieval pilgrim's route between France and
Spain).
In 1987, a year after
completing that pilgrimage, Paulo wrote his first book, The Pilgrimage (The
Diary of a Magus). The book describes his experiences during the
pilgrimage and his discovery that the extraordinary occurs in the lives
of ordinary people. In 1988, Paulo wrote another, very different book:
The Alchemist. This was a highly symbolic book, a metaphor of life,
which reflected his eleven years spent studying alchemy. The first
edition sold only 900 copies, and the publishing house decided not to
reprint.
Paulo would not give up
the pursuit of his dream. He got a second chance: he found a bigger
publishing house, Rocco, that was interested in his work. In 1990, he
published Brida, in which he wrote about the gift that we all carry
within us. The publication of this book, which, this time, received
plenty of press attention, took The Alchemist and The Pilgrimage to the
top of the bestseller lists. The Alchemist went on to sell more copies
than any other book in the history of Brazil, and even made it into the
Guinness Book of Records.
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