The Alchemist is a novel by Paulo Coelho first published in 1988. Originally written in Portuguese, it has been translated into 67 languages as of 2009. An allegorical novel, The Alchemist follows a young Andalusian shepherd named Santiago in his journey to Egypt, after having a recurring dream of finding treasure there.
Summary of Part I:
Santiago a young guy who loves traveling, decided to work as a Shepard to follow his dreams and to go around the world. He was having the same dream several times so he began to worry about this dream. And he thought that there something behind this dream...So he gets up and notices that his sheep begin to awaken, too, because as he tells us, “They are so used to me that they know my schedule.” After this he went to Tarifa to interpret his dream. There was an old woman there that interprets dreams.
The old woman tells him that dreams are the language of God, so Santiago tells her that twice he had dreamed that he was in his fields with his sheep when a child appeared and took his hands and transported him to the pyramids of Egypt. At the pyramids, the child had told him that if he came there, he would find a hidden treasure. Every time the child was about to tell him the location of the treasure, he would wake up. The old woman thinks for a bit and then tells him she won’t charge him anything that day, but that he must promise to give her one-tenth of the treasure if he finds it. He swears that he will and she tells him that it’s a dream about the language of the world and is very difficult to interpret. However, he must go to the pyramids, because if a child had shown them to him, they exist and he must find them to become a very rich man. He leaves, deciding that he’ll never believe in dreams again.
After that he went to the marketplace, at the plaza he sat on a bench, that's when an old man came to him. Santiago doesn't want to talk to the man, preferring to read or think about the merchant’s daughter. However, the man persists, and because he had been taught to be respectful to the elderly, he doesn't get up or refuse to speak. The old man picks up the boy’s book and tells him that it is a good book, but one that is really irritating, because it tells the same thing that almost all other books in the world describe. It also ends up saying the world’s greatest lie - “at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate.”
After that, the man told Santiago that he is the king of Salem, he told him that if he gives him one-tenth of the sheep he will tell where the treasure is, that's when Santiago predicted that he is the old woman's husband.
