La Strega Di Portobello

This book holds a special spot in my heart because it’s the first “grown-up book” I remember reading. When I look at the cover, I can still feel the thrill, excitement, and misplaced sense of defiance that came all over a bored eight-year-old me when I grabbed it from my aunt’s bookshelf.

Back then, my mom and I were staying with my aunt in an apartment that was barely large enough for one person, let alone three (two and a half?). Not the happiest time of my childhood, in retrospect, but I think I was too busy being interested in everything around me to notice, and The Witch of Portobello served as a helpful distraction and as a baptism into a new world.

In the following years, I ended up devouring most of what Coelho wrote—The Alchemist, Veronica Decides to Die, Brida, Like the Flowing River, Eleven Minutes, Manual of the Warrior of Light, Aleph, The Zahir, and I’m probably forgetting a few. It was full of mysticism and suffering and love, and just the right amount of erotism, and many other things I could barely understand, but back then it all felt like it was elevating me into a better state of being.

Unfortunately, as I grew up and developed a literary taste, I became disenchanted with Coelho’s works, to the point where I stopped keeping up with him.

Once you’ve read a couple of his books, all the others are pretty much the same: take a troubled character, put them on some modern spiritual enlightenment journey that draws from New Age, Catholicism, and whatever fancies Paulo’s faith on any given day, add a little bit of drama, love and erotism to keep the average reader engaged, and you have his next bestseller. The result is a slightly more ethereal version of Eat, Pray, Love.

In fact, re-reading The Witch of Portobello was a sad, challenging, and borderline shameful experience. At multiple points in the novel I found myself gasping at the shallowness of it all and recoiling at the idea that I once considered this to be the source of some profound spiritual teaching—and I hear it’s only gotten worse.

Overall, I wish I’d stopped reading Coelho back when I was still in love with him.

Highlights

• Si può scorgere il Divino in ogni granello di polvere, e questo non ci impedisce di scacciarlo con un colpo di spugna. In qualsiasi caso, il Divino non si allontana: semplicemente si trasforma nella superficie pulita.