I imagine that this book might say more about its reader than its text: when you know your own heart and your own journey well enough, perhaps this will only remain a passing, although enjoyable fairy tale. Perhaps that’s why I like this book so much – it doesn’t yield its secrets easily, or perhaps it yields it too easily, and you finish wondering where your heart and your treasure lie and what your personal legend might be. The book is allusive it works on you without seeming to, and at the end you’re left both satisfied as the adventure concludes and also wanting more, or perhaps wanting to do more. Hold it loosely and it comes easily, try to describe it and it flits away. That seems to be the point of the book, that the message is clear if you read it without trying to grab it. There’s always the sense as you read that there is something lingering under the surface, but the minute that you try to grab it (or write it in a review) it seems to disappear.

Biblical allusions abound next to Islamic lessons on the nature of God while institutions and mysticism are equally likely to be evoked and revoked.

The book constantly suggests and hints at lessons that seem at once a comment on ethics and metaphysics, history and anthropology, post-colonialist critique and folk fairy tale. The difficulty of the book is figuring out what that more is. It’s the kind of book that works on more than one level – you have your hero who goes on an adventure, learning from a wise mentor, hitting roadblocks, coming to know himself and the world around him before realizing that his true treasure was in himself all along, and if that’s all you get out of the book, then that’s fine, but there’s more going on here. Instead, I fell deeply in love with this book and have read it three times in the last two years. It didn’t do any of those things (and apparently kids these days don’t actually read their summer reading, what a shame).

The alchemist pdf