This might very well be the last Paulo Coelho book I ever read. How sad is that? Again I have to wonder: is it me or is it Coelho? One of us is definitely not the same.
I find it very hard to write this review. One ray of hope: I felt this book a bit stronger than The Witch of Portabello. Between the lines, among these pages, you can see inklings of bigger truths. Like the fact that we can do one of two things : build or plant. We can work hard and see a work completely finished in the end, which will be the end of life as we know it too, or we can keep growing gardens, in a never ending and eternally transforming effort. Genius, right? But such moments are very scarce. Well, I think that even one in a book is much more than other writers can achieve.
It made no impact on me whatsoever, I am afraid, although it is a book about love and Soul Mates, one of my favorite subjects as I am writing my book with a similar topic at the core. Maybe I also don’t agree with him. I mean, the theory of his Soul Mates is that the one soul brakes into two, and then again into two and so on. And he says that it is possible to meet two soul mates in the same life. How does his math work? It seems impossible to me and defies the very soul of the Soul Mate concept. I think he lost me from here.
I am not so sure that this will be the last Coelho book I ever read. I will probably pick each and every one of the subsequent ones, hoping that he will get his magic back. I am sure he will. Maybe they just push him too hard to finish these books. Maybe there are reasons. He is still Coelho, though. He will be back.
