Brazilian Balderdash (The Witch of Portobello - Paulo Coelho)

Member Name: MALU

Product:	The Witch of Portobello - Paulo Coelho
Date:	06/03/09 (310 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: still looking for some

Disadvantages: have found a lot

The Brazilian author Paulo Coelho (born in 1947) has been after me for a while, I can't enter a German bookshop without seeing piles of his books, all in the bestseller section, when browsing on the British or German Amazon, it doesn't take long until I come across one of his books, and dooyoo has listed 16 of his books for which 40 reviews have been written up to now. At last I've surrendered, I didn't buy his first and most successful novel, The Alchemist, though, but The Witch of Portobello because I've been to Portobello Road and I like books set in London.

Sherine Khalil, aka Athena, aka The Witch, was born in Transsylvania to a single Gypsy mother who left her in an orphanage from where she's been adopted by a well-to-do Lebanese couple. When war breaks out in Lebanon, they emigrate to London. Athena (as she's mostly called) starts college but drops out, marries, has a son, divorces her husband and moves to Dubai. She discovers her spiritual side and after returning to London shares her discovery with disciples which brings her into open conflict with the Church resulting in the threat to take her son away. Not yet thirty years old she's brutally murdered.

You think a reviewer should never tell the ending? Well, already on the second page her death is mentioned, the novel is a kind of retrospective biography. Kind of, an unknown narrator whose identity becomes known only in the last chapter tells us in an introductory paragraph that he's interviewed some people who knew Athena in order to write her biography but that he's given up the idea and that he's decided instead to let the transcripts of the various statements speak for themselves.

They come from a journalist, an actress, a doctor turned witch, a numerologist, Athena's adoptive mother, her ex-husband, a Catholic priest, a Polish neighbour, a bank manager, a Bedouin, a restaurant owner, Athena's birth mother, a French historian. I've listed them all to show you that they're quite a mixed lot. Naturally, the statements are all in the first person perspective which means the reader is addressed directly and thus involved more than they would be if the novel were written in the third person perspective - or at least should be.

The statements are arranged so that the reader can follow Athena's life chronologically. This is positive, I don't like jumping forward and backward through a story, but what is very, very negative is that all thirteen characters speak more or less in the same way. I'm sure that this is not the fault of the translator Margaret Jull Costa, the English texts reads fluently, in fact it doesn't seem to be translated at all, which is a great compliment for a translator. It must be entirely Coelho's fault, he isn't able to give the different characters different voices. Now that I'm at it I can also tell you that the end is a great let-down, for me it's clear that the author didn't know how to finish his yarn properly. When he reveals who the narrator is, I had to think of a magician pulling a rabbit out of his top hat shouting, "Surprise, surprise!" And, before I forget, nothing is made of London or Portobello Road.

I can also not find many different facets of Athena's character in the different statements, the same idea is rubbed in again and again, namely "How do we find the courage to always be true to ourselves - even if we are unsure of who we are?" First we must find out who we are, don't think you can get away with saying that you're content with your life, this means only that you're weak and afraid of change. Then when you've accepted that you don't live your true self, the question arises how to find it. Following Athena's example this means: Dance for hours to percussion music from Siberian shamans until you're in trance, open yourself so that The Mother can get into you. The Mother is the female side of God (in case you didn't know). Herbal potions, looking into the flame of a candle for a long time, sitting naked side by side with a kindred spirit, lying on the ground in a wood at night may also help. The last step is, of course, that you leave your old life and start a new one. You're not sure how and where? The Mother will guide you, just believe!

Try telling this to an inhabitant of a favela in Rio de Janeiro (Coelho's city) or, if you don't want to go so far, to someone in your own country who's just been made redundant and doesn't know how to make ends meet. I doubt that you'd get out of the conversation unscathed. It's typical middle-class, bourgeois dross.

I've read some reviews on other novels by Coelho and have got the impression that his gospel is always the same, it's only embellished differently with longer or shorter references to (oriental) religions, philosophy, spirituality, mysticism and moral parables, in other words: New Age Stuff. (Remember The Age of Aquarius?) In my naivety I thought that all this mumbo jumbo had petered out after the hippie heydays in the 1960s and 70s, but obviously that is not the case.

At the end of my copy is an interview with the author from which I've learnt that he writes a book every two years, he needs only about a month to write it down because he's already got it in his mind when he starts writing. The rest of the time he 'lives', for example, he goes dancing at least once a week. Goody! There are worse ways for a sixty-something to pass the time. But what gives me the creeps is the success the man has: in total, he has sold more than 100 million books in over 150 countries worldwide, and his works have been translated into 67 languages. He is the all-time bestselling Portuguese author.

Whatever happened to Enlightenment?

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Harper
368 pages
RRP 7.99

Summary: Find your true self with the help of a white witch.