Book Review- The Pilgrimage by Paulo Cohelo

 

On a whim of fancy I bought a paperback copy of this novel, and never have I regretted buying something so much. I kept delaying reading this one, as I wanted a backup plan in case I got fed up of reading eBooks and wasn’t able to buy hard copies due to some reason.. And low and behold that doomsday was the Covid pandemic. This is one of those books which I will never reread again. Even finishing it once was such a struggle for me, and I never managed to read more than 3 chapters of it in a day. Even though the Alchemist leaned a bit towards supernatural, it was a book with a good flow and an engaging story of someone on a treasure hunt. The Pilgrimage shows every sign of being the authors maiden book. The problem with this is that the core elements of this book are extremely unambiguous. Even after reading the whole book I was left questioning what the concept of RAM, or the Tradition truly was! Even though the story gives a good message of focusing on what you want to do with the reward, rather than on getting the reward itself, I was confused what the author did with his reward i.e. the sword in the story. The only things that kept me reading was the journey and the incidents. Being an avid hiker, I have always been fascinated with long distance hiking. And Camino de Santiago in Spain is one of the most famous hikes out there. Every year thousands of pilgrims as well as travelers walk this pathway from France to Spain  in search of something, whether it be moral satisfaction or adventure. The story about how this pilgrimage trail was formed, how its popularity fell in the middle ages and how finally it became important again interested me. The various small incidents in quaint villages with insignificant people fascinated me. It was this wanderlust than kept me going. This is a shorter than average review than I normally write, mostly because I liked so less about this book. Overall a 2.8/5 for me. This is a typical example of a book with excellent background setting and narration, but poor core story.

Route of Camino de Santiago