Hippie by Paulo Coelho
An autobiographical novel about the hippie culture, Sufism, self-discovery, and a bus journey
“Those who wish to learn magic ought to begin by looking around them.”
The Plot
‘Hippie’, as the name suggests, is a novel about hippies. It is an autobiographical fiction which tells the story of the author as a young man (he retains the name Paulo for the protagonist of the book). Paulo Coelho’s readers know that during the height of the Hippie Movement in the world, that is during the 60s and the 70s, Paulo also experimented with that infamous culture of love, sex, peace, drugs and freedom – in other words, he was a hippie. This novel recounts his experience in Latin America as a hippie and his experience travelling on the Hippie Trail – a trail from Europe to India that hippies from across the world travelled on, in a bus or a train. Paulo, too, in this novel, takes a journey across the Hippie Trail with a companion, Karla, from Amsterdam. Karla wants to go to Kathmandu in Nepal in order to discover her true self. Paulo joins along, but he’s not sure if he wants to go to Nepal. They travel on a cheap bus – popularly dubbed as “Magic Bus” – with other hippies that used to take hippies from Europe to Nepal. On the way, there transpires a love-story between Paulo and Karla (although Paulo, a man in his seventies now, calls it a love-story, a much younger writer would choose to use the now-popular term ‘situationship’, used increasingly to describe a relationship between two individuals who fancy each other but are not committed to one another.)
The novel is, therefore, a story about the Hippie Culture, Drugs, Europe of the 60s and 70s, a bus journey with an exciting cast of characters (the bus driver, for example, who is a former doctor; or Rayan and Mirthe, an Irish couple; or Jacques and his daughter, a French father-daughter duo). Each character has his own back-story, which Paulo tells in the novel. According to Paulo’s own admission, all these characters are real people with real stories – only their names have been changed while rendering reality into fiction.
Sufism
While on the bus, Paulo makes it clear that he wishes to dance with the whirling dervishes, the Sufis, when they reach Istanbul. As the bus stops in Istanbul for some days, Paulo goes out looking for Sufis and a Master. Unsurprisingly, he finds one. (Spoiler Alert!) Paulo decides that his destiny is not in Nepal, but in Istanbul. He, therefore, does not rejoin the group for its further journey to Nepal. He stays back in Istanbul, with the Sufi master. In a later part of the book Paulo reveals that he stayed there for about a year before leaving – he never became a Sufi, because that requires converting to Islam, but he did learn the philosophy.
Why was this bit important? Well, because it explains Coelho’s philosophy. Previously while reading Coelho, I have encountered many elements which are not just similar but same as those propounded by the Sufi philosophers – for example, the emphasis on living in the present moment, loving for the sake of love, and many others. Before reading this novel, I did not know that Coelho had studied with a Sufi master for a year, but there were clear elements of Sufi philosophy in his writing. So far it remained inexplicable how a writer from Latin America was propounding a philosophy so similar to the Sufism, which is otherwise restricted to Asia and Islamic nations. But now that mystery is solved: he studied Sufism in Turkey with a Master for a year – of course his writing bears Sufi elements! It would be a surprise if it didn’t.
Conclusion
The novel, although a mildly interesting read, is by no means one of Paulo’s best works. (As far as I’m concerned, his best works still remain By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept and The Zahir.) Most readers of Paulo, myself included, have been disappointed in this one.