Brida: A Novel (P.S.)

Great novel! Shows you that when you look for the wonderful feeling, love, the person who we think is the right person to share that feeling, it could be just someone who are going to teach us something alone the way.

Glad I read this as it pertains to something that I've been thinking about, true love. In any case highly recommended for those who think about love, if you can get through all the other stuff about rituals and religious witchcraft

Great novel! Shows you that when you look for the wonderful feeling, love, the person who we think is the right person to share that feeling, it could be just someone who are going to teach us something alone the way.

Glad I read this as it pertains to something that I've been thinking about, true love. In any case highly recommended for those who think about love, if you can get through all the other stuff about rituals and religious witchcraft

I want to be respectful with other reviewers and to admit that, beyond my thoughts, somebody else might find this book interesting. However, I want to say that I agree with every single comment of the 1 star reviewers. It's hard to believe Paulo Coelho wrote this. I've read some of his books before and this one doesn't compare at all. This book -as the rest of his collection- contains some few nice quotes, but the story connecting the overall ideas is very weak. Put it this way... Coelho's attempt to connect magic with spirituality was as good as it would be my attempt to relate pigs with tooth paste...

Interestingly, I gave this book as a present to somebody else and we did read it simultaneously. My friend also found this story very poor developed. It honestly looks like if he had been forced to write something in the last minute.

I won't tell you not to read it... but from the bottom of my heart, I hope you get if for free because actually I think we should be paid to read something like this... (It's painful and I regret the valuable hours of my life I spent reading it...).

Good luck!

Me encantó los lindos mensajes que nos deja acerca del amor, la amistad y la religión. Me sentí identificada en varios momentos de la historia. Una gran lectura para aquellos que tenemos dudas al momento de elegir un camino en la vida.

Frases cortas y simples, faciles de digerir. Una dama joven y hermosa, fácil de digerir. La misma simple formula de siempre que muy pocos pueden repetir. Solo Coelho. El eterno Coelho, que explora, inspira. y provoca leer, una y otra vez.

Anyone who has read Paulo Coelho knows that his stories are often fantastical tales that center on the mysteries of the spirit. Brida is the story of a woman on a journey of self-discovery who finds spirituality through magic. There were some definite surprises in this book. For example, sex is used as a means of obtaining spiritual power. After having read his explanation in the afterword I guess I can understand where he was going with that but it was a bit of a shock to the system when I actually read it in the context of the story. Without giving too much away I can say that there are two different sides to the 'magical coin': The Tradition of the Moon and the Tradition of the Sun. By studying either of these the individual is opening themselves up to God and all that He created. I liked it but in my opinion The Alchemist was far and away more powerful. If you're interested in his take on magic vs spirituality vs religion then I encourage you to give this book a try but if you're only reading it because you liked The Alchemist (oops) then you might be in for a shock.

Coelho's (The Alchemist, 1988, The Witch of
Portobello, 2007) ability to draw from Catholic and
esoteric spiritual teachings and couch the syncretic
result within a fictional narrative has made him a
beloved spiritual staple for decades. Originally
published in 1990, this purports to be the true story
of the spiritual quest of 21-year old Brida. Her
questions about life and the occult lead her to two
teachers: a magician and a witch. They instruct Brida
to keep the bridge open between the visible and the
invisible, to identify her spiritual Gift, and to
reunite with her Other Part, a by-product of the
soul-division that occurs during reincarnation.
This is an excessively and explicitly
didactic novel, with dry exchanges. Coelho includes a
few appealing rituals, which he sternly warns the
reader against using without appropriate guidance,
some compelling precepts, a brief discussion of the
spiritual dimension of sex (a special orgasm is
required for Brida's spiritual initiation), and a
regrettable abundance of underdeveloped and
contradictory elements. This is one of Coelho's less
inspired and more forgettable works, but his fans may
be likely to request it. An optional purchase for
bookstores and public libraries where spiritual themes
are popular.

Anyone who has read Paulo Coelho knows that he writes with a wisdom and grace that reaches out and touches your soul. He writes with poise and beauty that is, unfortunately, lacking in the majority of modern literature. "Brida" is just another reminder that a beautiful story can be used as a way of teaching a wonderful, necessary lesson. It's not a story that was written just for the sake of being written; it was written because the world had something to say.
In Brida, we follow Brida, a 21 year old girl looking to become a witch, on a pilgrimage of self-discovery and world-discovery, looking to find answers to questions we all sometimes ask ourselves. Through her, we as readers get to learn about the Tradition of the Sun and the Tradition of the moon. As we watch Brida learn and grow, we learn what it means to have utter and absolute faith in something, in the world. We also learn that magic itself, the magic of the world, comes from having faith and allowing ourselves to trust in that faith.
One of my biggest problems with this book was Brida herself. She was a smoker, and it didn't seem to fit with her or her personality at all. I'm totally biased when it comes to smokers - I like them less, and that's just a fact. Still, in this book, I thought I had Brida figured out, and then suddenly out of nowhere she smokes a cigarette, and it just rubbed me the wrong way. It didn't fit in with any of the images I had in my head about who she was. There were other things about her as well that just didn't jive - times when she got angry or confused or frustrated, and it just didn't make sense for the person that she was becoming.
Which makes me feel as if I must have been missing something. Paulo Coelho's books always have some deeper meaning under the surface, and I feel like, through my lack of ability to understand Brida, I missed out on something big.
And yet despite that, I loved it. I loved the passion and the love and the beauty and the faith and the spirituality and the transformation. It was a page turner through and through. It was literally one of those books that I couldn't put down no matter how hard I tried. And in the end, it had me thinking for days.
What I found most amazing about this book was how much Coehlo managed to transmit to us through sheer simplicity. It was a short, simplistic story that contained so much more than seems possible in just 200 pages.
Utterly spellbinding, I think, is the best way to describe it.

This premise of this book sounded intriguing, but it turned out to be excruciatingly boring. I would have given it only one or two stars, but it was saved by some occasional gems of phrases.

It attempts to combine literary fiction about a young woman's travels in Ireland with Christian and Wiccan wisdom teachings, but doesn't succeed on any of these fronts. It's too abstract to be either interesting or consistently meaningful. And the part about very young woman seducing an old geezer is really squicky (for a female reader, anyway.)

Unless you are looking for some great quotes, I'd recommend giving this a skip and reading a good novel set in Ireland and/or a real book on Christianity or Wicca. Or read Veronika Decides To Die for a much better book by this author.

(247 pages)

Quotes from Brida:

" . . . down below, the lights in the village were beginning to come on. Soon, families would be gathering around the table to have supper. They worked hard and honestly. They feared God, and they tried to help their fellow man. They did all these things because they had known love. Their lives had a reason. They could understand everything that was going on in the Universe."

"There had been a time when nothing in the world was as important as herself. She'd had several boyfriends, and had always believed that she loved each one, only to see love vanish from one moment to the next. Of all the things she'd experienced until then, love had been the most difficult."

"Once again, she was putting her belief in love, trusting her feelings. But she'd been disappointed so often before that she was no longer sure of anything. Nevertheless, this was the great gamble of her life."

"People had been trying to understand the Universe through love since the beginning of time."

"'Perhaps solitude has made his madness worse,' Brida thought, and again she felt the first stirrings of panic. She may have been young, but she knew the harm that loneliness could do to people, especially as they got older. She had met people who had lost the glow of being alive, because they could no longer fight against loneliness, and had ended up becoming addicted to it. They were for the most part, people who believed the world to be an undignified, inglorious place, and who spent their evenings and nights talking on and on about the mistakes others had made. They were people whom solitude had made into the judges of the world, whose verdicts were scattered to the four winds for whoever cared to listen."

""But how will I know who my soulmate is?" . . .
'By taking risks,' she said to Brida. "By risking failure, disappointment, disillusion, but never ceasing in your search for love. As long as you keep looking, you will triumph in the end.' "

"'Is it possible to meet more than one soulmate in each life?'
Yes, thought Wicca with a certain bitterness. And when that happens, the heart is divided, and the result is pain and suffering.
'Yes, we can meet three or four soulmates, because we are many and we are scattered. . . . The essence of creation is one, and one alone', she said, ' and that essence is called love. Love is the force that brings us back together, in order to condense the experience dispersed in many lives in many parts of the world. We are responsible for the whole earth, because we do not know where they might be, those soulmates we were from the beginning of time. If they are well, then we too will be happy. If they are not well, we will suffer, however unconsciously, a portion of their pain. Above all, though, we are responsible for re-encountering at least once in every incarnation, the soulmate who is sure to cross our path. Even if it is only for a matter of moments, because those moments bring with them a love so intense that it justifies the rest of our days . . . We can also allow our soulmate to pass us by, without accepting him or her or even noticing. Then we will need another incarnation in order to find that soulmate. And because of our selfishness, we will be condemned to the worst torture humankind ever invented for itself: loneliness."

"The solitude of forests is harder to bear than the solitude of towns." (I found this quote interesting because I completely disagree with it. I guess it depends on the person.)

Brida is a very simple story, through and through. Coelho tells the story of a young Irish girl, and her journey of spiritual self-discovery as she simultaeneously searches for her Soul Mate and uncovers her Gift while training to become a witch. It doesn't pretend to be anything more than this, there are no side stories to distract the reader. This is very nice. I enjoyed not having to split my attention between competing storylines.

However, along with the simplicity of story is a simplicity of style. The writing technique was almost too simplistic. It didn't even read at a young adult level; perhaps more of an adolescent. Perhaps this was done for a reason. Mass market appeal, maybe? Or maybe it was a plot device. Simplicity in the storyline equals simplicity in writing? Whatever the reason, it actually detracted from my enjoyment of the book. I prefer more complexity in my books. Given the storyline of spiritual self-discovery it doesn't fit either.

That said, the book itself was very inspiring. Bride's journey to find herself is one that I've undertaken and sadly forgotten, left to wither. Coehlo's novel has aroused in me a desire to pick up where I left off, to find my spiritual roots and a community with which to worship.

I have rated this book at three stars, because it's appeal was more personal than critical. Critically speaking, I enjoyed the story, but it wasn't anything special. I'm not opposed to reading more of his work, but I'm not going to rush right out and pick up another of Coelho's books either.