In Coelho’s new book you are taken back to the days of “Make Peace Not War”. Every year when Coelho publishes a new book, it is a special kind of journey that the reader is taken on. Coelho has the rare gift of telling these incredible stories, but he is also a writer who does not focus on just writing novels. Within his novels, he shares his knowledge which he gathered over the years while travelling the world and learning different kind of religions and cultures with his readers. His new book, Hippie, is one of them.
Hippie is based on the time in which Coelho was travelling the world and living the way of a hippie. Written from a third person perspective, you are introduced to his girlfriend, Karla, and get to know how the flower children have financed their travels, how they got information through the “invisible newspaper“, and some very unexpected situations in which only Coelho can put himself in.
The novel is an unusual cocktail of religion meets backpacking and reading a copy of Arthur Frommer’s “Europe On Five Dollars a Day” in a VW bus.
Coelho’s readers, which read all his books as I have, cannot wait to get their hands on a new story and be taken away on a magnificent unique adventure. However, this book did come across as somewhat of a disappointment for me. I missed the magic which typically surrounds his words, I missed the typical writing style, and I missed the story. The book feels more like a re-narration of what happened years ago and it did not catch me at all.
Typically, there is always some kind of message in his books, this time if there was one, I did not find it. It was hard for me to concentrate on it, because for me there was no clear plot. It felt unsettled and it was not clear to me what the conclusion it is. Nevertheless, I believe that it was important for him to get what was inside his head on paper and I hope that the next book will be a story that will take his reader’s breath away as The Alchemist or The Devil and Miss Prym did.
Hippe is available now from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers.
Have you read Hippie? Tell us in the comments below!
Synopsis | Goodreads
In Hippie, his most autobiographical novel to date, Paulo Coelho takes us back in time to re-live the dream of a generation that longed for peace and dared to challenge the established social order – authoritarian politics, conservative modes of behavior, excessive consumerism, and an unbalanced concentration of wealth and power.
Following the “three days of peace and music” at Woodstock, the 1969 gathering in Bethel, NY that would change the world forever, hippie paradises began to emerge all around the world. In the Dam Square in Amsterdam, long-haired young people wearing vibrant clothes and burning incense could be found meditating, playing music and discussing sexual liberation, the expansion of consciousness and the search for an inner truth. They were a generation refusing to live the robotic and unquestioning life that their parents had known.
At this time, Paulo is a young, skinny Brazilian with a goatee and long, flowing hair who wants to become a writer. He sets off on a journey in search of freedom and a deeper meaning for his life: first, with a girlfriend, on the famous “Death Train to Bolivia,” then on to Peru and later hitchhiking through Chile and Argentina.
His travels take him further, to the famous square in Amsterdam, where Paulo meets Karla, a Dutch woman also in her 20s. She convinces Paulo to join her on a trip to Nepal, aboard the Magic Bus that travels across Europe and Central Asia to Kathmandu. They embark on a journey in the company of fascinating fellow travelers, each of whom has a story to tell, and each of whom will undergo a transformation, changing their priorities and values, along the way. As they travel together, Paulo and Karla explore their own relationship, an awakening on every level that brings each of them to a choice and a decision that sets the course for their lives thereafter.
