I’ll be up front: I don’t get Paulo Coelho. At all. I don’t get why his books sell in the millions, why people line up in droves to have their books signed, what the appeal is. But that doesn’t mean I won’t write about him if the story is sufficiently odd, and this one, delivered here by the Guardian, certainly is.
Essentially Coehlo decided to make his pilgrimage to Siberia – in a specially converted train – to mark the 20th anniversary of of his visit to Santiago de Compostela in Spain in 1986, which inspired his book, The Pilgrimage. The two-week long trip from Moscow to Vladivostok takes 5,772 miles, and there have been screaming, weeping fans all along the way.
The response has taken Coelho, who has sold more than 86m books, by surprise. “This pilgrimage has given me hope that art can create a bridge between peoples,” he told the Guardian. So why is he especially popular in Russia? “Russians particularly like that he talks about difficult philosophical ideas in an easy, accessible way that gives them a spiritual experience without spiritual labour,” said a literary critic, Aleksander Gavrilov.