I was in a total fix with task of posting a review in our class blog. I spent days contemplating and searching,rather recollecting the name of any one book I had read recently. Just the day before the deadline,the witch of Portobello by Paulo Coelho popped up in my mind. So here it goes.
To begin with Paulo Coelho is a Brazilian lyricist,novelist and the author of the international bestseller The Alchemist. The book The Witch of Portobello is the story about Athena,a striking, energetic, fearless young woman who follows the voice of her heart.
The book is not a straight biography or the opinion of the writer on the main protagonist. Rather it is a compilation of various anecdotes that the writer collected or came over about the protagonist from people who were acquaintaned or associated with her.
As the book begins,Athena ,the protagonist is dead. How she ended up that way,the intrigue to know that sustains the book. Sherine Khalil,better known as Athena,was born in Romania and was adopted by a family from Beirut. She was much loved and much wanted daughter who grew on wisdom and beauty. From childhood itself she had a strong religious vocation and knew the gospel by heart. With the outbreak of war,her family moved from Beirut to London.
She received the best of education that she left before completing; got married and divorced with a son in twenty; left the Church, on which she had deep faith from her childhood, after it forbade her from receiving sacrament, due to her divorce; a good job in a bank what she left when she was being just more than successful; took the job of selling land in dessert and left that too when she was earning more than enough, a successful Journalist, whom she left, who was ready to leave everything to love her. Her aim was to find the meaning of life.
According to the author,there are four archetypes of women who search for meaning to their lives or for the path of knowledge
The Virgin (not the sexual virgin): One whose search springs from her complete independence and everything she learns is the fruit of her ability to face challenges alone.
The Martyr: The one who finds her way to self-knowledge through pain, surrender and suffering.
The Saint: The one who finds her true reason for living in unconditional love and in her ability to give without asking anything in return.
The Witch: The one who justifies her existence by going in search of complete and limitless pleasure.
Athena was all four at once but the witch dominated her the most.
Athena was not content. She felt that there were blank spaces in her life just like the spaces that exists between each word. Those blank spaces give meaning to everything. She tried to understand those blank spaces by pursuing music,dance and calligraphy. When she felt that they are not enough to make her content,she went in search of her birthmother.
She kept constantly destroying and rebuilding herself. Everything in her life had followed the same pattern: from lost to found; from divorce to new love; from working in a bank to selling real estate in the desert. There was only one thing which remained intact, that was her son. He was the only connecting thread.
Nothing could contend her restless soul; nothing could bring her peace of mind, neither even reaching Vertex through dancing or calligraphy. And finally she went to teach people something she didn’t know, that’s when she was bringing the soul to the surface, and speaking what the eternity, depicted as ‘the Mother’ in the book, wants to reveal through her.
Athena was bringing to the surface the immensely rich world we carry in our souls, without realizing that people aren’t yet ready to accept their own powers. That’s why the writer describes her as a woman of twenty-second century living in the twenty-first, and making no secret of the fact either. That was her biggest problem.
The book talks about free love, a river which overflows its banks, which is above all the concept we associate with love, like desire, possession or betray.
“Love fills everything. It cannot be desired because it is and end in itself. It cannot betray because it has nothing to do with possession. It cannot be held prisoner because it is a river and will overflow its banks. Anyone who tries to imprison love will cut off the spring that feeds it, and the trapped water will grow stagnant and rank”
That’s the path the Witch of Portobello was following throughout her life, until she was brutally murdered.
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