Paulo Coelho's Fiction Existential and Spiritual Preoccupation: Select Study of Seven Novels

Paulo Coelho’s fictional contribution of his first seven novels, namely, The Alchemist, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept, The Fifth Mountain, Veronika Decides to Die, The Devil and Miss Prym, Eleven Minutes and The Zahir, initiates and takes forward his personal search for himself. Each novel fictitiously registers a confrontation with his self. Sketching predominantly, the self-exploration, the self-actualization of the protagonists, and the writer’s own quest, all these novels are principally categorized as spiritual. However, what still differentiates and lends them with a character of its own, is an atmosphere of ennui, meaninglessness, nothingness, absurdity, anxiety and awareness of death, that Coelho’s contemporary vision cannot help taking into account. It is this ambience of difference that also makes his novels, at the outset, peculiarly existential. Coelho’s existential and spiritual preoccupation becomes the core of his fictional writings that delight as well as transform the reader who invariably finds herself/himself in the vicinity of one protagonist or the other.