Experience is always the story that fits best in literature, like train coaches, this time heading toward the past.Ĭoelho's new book 'Hippie' and the author back in 1970 - Source: Official Facebook page What I wrote was quite simply my experience. You can't take a step to the left or right without people attacking you. I wrote the book because I see today's world, where people are increasingly afraid of everything. Traveling was one of the keys to the hippie movement. The protagonist leaves looking for personal growth and for that, experiences a series of events the way traditional heroes do - the writer's vocation, an old love, arrest and torture by paramilitaries, the trip to Amsterdam, an offer to become a drug trafficker, a new love, the Hare Krishna movement, the Sufi, the trip to Nepal - until he reaches his goal.ĭid you plan the novel's entire trajectory? Or did you treat it like a road movie and let yourself be led by the character's experiences and desires? A traditional road movie about traveling through different geographies. It's just that in Hippie I'm more visible: I'm him.

But yeah, all of the characters I create are mine. Curiously, the book made me observe what is happening now, in these totally conservative societies of ours that have killed the inner freedom we had in that period. I wrote the book in the third person so I could see myself and look at things from a greater distance than how I perceived them at the time. Some more visibly so, such as The Pilgrimage or The Valkyries, and others less so. PAULO COELHO: All my books are a reflection of my soul. How did it feel being your own character this time? You say its events did happen and you only pass them through the filter of fiction for the reader's benefit. The book, already available in Europe and the United States, will be on sale in Argentina starting in September.ĬLARIN: Hippie is self-fiction. On his release, he decides to follow though on his oft-imagined plans to travel to Europe and onto Nepal. The book recalls young Paulo's adventures in the wake of an affair with an older woman, including a prison stint and torture in then military-run Brazil.

'And it's what I did when I wrote Hippie, just recounting what I had experienced.' 'I think that is what writing is,' Coelho says. and go on till you come to the end: then stop.' In an interview by e-mail, the Brazilian writer tells Clarín that in writing Hippie, he followed the simple advice of Alice in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll: 'Begin at the beginning. It's fast-paced, but he'd prefer people don't treat it 'like a thriller' and rush through it. His latest - and 20th book overall - is a 'fictional' autobiography called Hippie. BUENOS AIRES - A new book by Paulo Coelho is always something to look forward to.

Hippie paulo coelho summary