Transform your life. Rewrite your destiny. In his most personal novel to date, internationally best-selling 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, he decides 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 Railway, ...
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Transform your life. Rewrite your destiny. In his most personal novel to date, internationally best-selling 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, he decides 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 Railway, 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: Are we where we want to be, doing what we want to do? Some books are read. "Aleph "is lived."
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Add this copy of Aleph (Audio Cd) to cart. $19.95, good condition, Sold by Meadeco Media rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from VINE GROVE, KY, UNITED STATES, published 2011 by Books on Tape.
This is a deeply unpleasant novel, the first of the author's that I have read, and probably the last. Human relationships, primarily it seems heterosexual ones, are drained of a contemporary context and recast instead as refractions of former lives. One can self-time-warp back to whenever it is by standing near the junction between railway carriages or by imagining oneself to jiggle hula-hoops up and down one's body, sort of Paul Daniels' assistant on LSD. Back then, the narrator presided over the religious torture and slaughter of young women, which gives the author the opportunity for gratuitous Mills & Boon style soft-core sadism, which he attempts to justify by co-opting shamans to his tawdry and moneygrubbing purposes. It's all about him anyway, an egomaniac who never tires of signing his own books at every stop on his long and tedious trundle across the tundra to Vladivostok aboard the trans-Siberian express while practising his own form of selfish Tantric mind-sex with a violin-playing nymphomanic who if she had had half a personality would have settled his nonsense with a meat-cleaver well before they got to Novosibirsk. Coelho at one point has the temerity to suggest that Lenin (he'd just spotted a statue) would have done better to spread a form of universal love rather than try to better the lot of the working class. Oh yes? So the rest of the world, and western Europe in particular, would have been able to withstand Hitler if the Red Army had not (as Winston Churchill put it) 'torn the guts out of the Nazi war machine'? And how would the faux-spiritual Mr Coelho have tried to do that? With hula-hoops perhaps?
