Portuguese 1992, English Translation 1995
This is a Magical Tale about Forgiving Our Past and Believing in Our Future. The book is spiritual journey of self-discovery and is a good read with build up of suspense throughout the book. It is a book with limited characters, serially written timeline and narrated in third person.
The enchanting, true story of The Valkyries begins in Rio de Janeiro when author Paulo Coelho gives his mysterious master codenamed “J.”, the only manuscript for his book The Alchemist. Haunted by a devastating curse, Coelho confesses to his master, “I’ve seen my dreams fall apart just when I seemed about to achieve them.” In response, J. gives Coelho a daunting task: He must find and speak with his guardian angel. “The curse can be broken,” he replies, “if you complete the task.”
Rising to the challenge, Paulo and his wife, Cristina, drop everything, pack their bags, and take off on a forty-day adventure into the starkly beautiful and sometimes dangerous Mojave Desert where they encounter more than they bargained for. A masterful blend of the exotic locales, dramatic adventure, and magical storytelling, for which Coelho’s fictional works are renowned, this true-life account is at once a modern-day adventure and a metaphysical odyssey.
This is one of those books which you cannot put it down once you start reading it.. It is so simple yet so deep! It is all so true, how Coelho describes us destroying everything good that we have in our lives, because we are always too blind to see it.
So, beneath the garb of a magical fiction, The Valkyries exhibits the best way to live, by having confidence in one’s own abilities and thoughts. And, here Paulo leads by not only indulging unabashedly in traditional rituals, without fearing any criticism, but also by exposing the darkest years of his life, his innermost feelings and troubled intimacy with his wife, with a boldness, few of the men could ever dare to. The Valkyries could speak to and to see their angels.
I am listing some of the paragraphs, which I liked in the book.
Anything that happens once, can never occur again. However, should it happen again, it will surely happen a third time. (Page 7)
People always kill the things they love.
And each man kills the things he loves
By all let this be heard
Some do it with a bitter look
Some with a flattering Word
The coward does it with a kiss
The brave man with a sword (Page 9)
Between the mountain and the car was a rocky valley with sparse vegetation: thorn bushes, cacti, and yucca. “Life that insisted on surviving in an environment that it didn’t support it” (40)
Everything in life is a ritual. Each person performs them perfectly because they are afraid that if any part is left out, everything will go wrong. The name of that ritual is Routine. (162)
Elderly people spend the time remaining to them looking only in one direction – the past. It is that looking in that direction they will not see anything to fear. Very few old people look to the future. When one looks into the future, we see what it holds for us – death. (201)
What is infatuation? Two lovers would be fascinated by eachother, as long as each has remained exactly what the other imagined. That is the creation of an image of someone, without advising that someone as to what that image be. Moreover, when either of them reveals how they really are, the other would want to flee – because it would mean the end of the world they had created. (224).
