The Witch of Portobello - Paulo Coelho
I went into this with 0 expectations and I have never read a Paulo Coelho book (though I know that he's polarizing - frankly after this book I do understand why).
Initially I thought that this book would be really easy to get through about 65% through I found it more than a little challenging to focus up, I'm still glad that I gave it a fair shake because I would never have thought to try this book off my own back.
Basically it follows a series of interviews about the titular Witch and her life after she is found murdered. It covers a range of people present in her life from her family, her ex-husband to a BBC reporter she meets in Transylvania who falls in love with her.
I enjoyed the premise of this book a lot, it had this mysterious and almost esoteric vibe as Athena's story is told from all of these different perspectives. It reminded me in the early stages a lot of one of my favourite documentaries Dreams of A Life ... unfortunately it doesn't really stick to this for long. I quickly found that a lot of the interviewees had basically the same voice - why does a Bedouin from Dubai, a bank manager from London and Athena's birth mother from Romania sound alike?||
My favorite scene in the whole book was during some of the earlier segments during the early parts of her marriage and afterwards - mainly around her relationship with the priest and the Catholic church. The scene when she was denied the eucharist after her divorce is genuinely quite upsetting. Buuuut... the rest of the book has kind of a weird vibe in regards to religion vs spirituality. It comes across as a bit reductive to me. It also feels like the author threw everything and the kitchen sink in - we've got Paganism, talk of Daoism/Buddism, Catholicism, Romani beliefs, Jungian psychology... it's all a little much. Generally that sums up the majority of this book.
I could mostly get through all the weird preachiness - a lot of the premise was just very strange, following leaving organized religion, she starts a...dance cult? That energizes everyone at her banking job so she gets sent to Dubai where she starts to study calligraphy? I was initially kind of into Athena as a character but very early on I found that we weren't really going to get much to her character outside of her being kind of a manic-pixie Mary Sue. But I drove on, the premise of a lookback of her life following her murder was enough of a motivator for me to continue as she stumbled into each of these people's lives and had this illuminating, life changing effect on them. Bro even her ex-husband who she borderline babytrapped is like "yeah she's still great, I love her" I think it would have carried a little more verisimilitude if we had some more realistic varied opinions on her - hell I'd have even settled for her downstairs neighbor who was sick of her clomping around early in the morning for her ritual dance.
But what KILLED IT for me is that I was already waning towards the end of this book - sadly it was around the time that her cult started to take off and the leaky rambling about spirituality amped up to 100 that it's revealed that the boyfriend she kept mentioning who worked for Scotland Yard (who no one believed was real) helped fake her death and she was never even murdered in the first place because she got tired of running a cult??? THE ONLY THING THAT WAS STRINGING ME ALONG AND IT DIDN'T EVEN HAPPEN.
Mostly I settled at about a 3/3.25 for this, early on I was pretty hooked, I can't deny it but I just started to lose more and more steam as it went on. At least I've read a Paulo Coelho book now lmao.
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