Review: Hippie

Hippie by Paulo Coelho
Page length: 304 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Date: 25 September 2018
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Source: ARC via NetGalley
 
Stars:  5 out of 5
 
Link: AMAZON (UK)

 
ABOUT HIPPIE
 
Drawing on the rich experience of his own life, bestselling author Paulo Coelho takes us back in time to relive the dreams of a generation that longed for peace and dared to challenge the established social order.
 
In HIPPIE, he tells the story of Paulo, a skinny Brazilian with a goatee and long hair, setting off on a journey in search of a deeper meaning for his life.
 
He travels on the famous ‘Death Train to Bolivia’, then on to Peru, later hitchhiking through Chile and Argentina. In the famous Dam Square in Amsterdam he finds young people playing music, while discussing sexual liberation, the expansion of consciousness and the search for an inner truth.
 
There he meets Karla, a Dutch woman in her twenties who has been waiting to find the ideal companion to accompany her on the fabled hippie trail to Nepal. Together with their fellow travellers, they embark on a trip aboard the Magic Bus, heading across Europe and Central Asia to Kathmandu.
 
For everyone, the journey is transformative. For Paulo and Karla it is a life-defining love story that leads to choices that will set the course of the rest of their lives.
 

My Review:

I really enjoyed Paula Coelho's The Alchemist and I jumped at the opportunity of reading Hippie. I shopped short of reading Mr Coelho's Wikipedia page for fear of giving any of his story away.
 
Hippie starts:
The stories that follow come from my personal experiences. I've altered the order, names, and details of the people here, I was forced to condense some scenes, but everything that follows truly happened to me. I've used the third person because this allowed me to give characters unique voices with which to describe their lives.
 
With the above in mind, there are elements that are unbelievable – but as they say – truth is stranger than fiction!
 
It was a quick read, but it still checked in at over 300 pages. In the first chapter I felt I had time-travelled to the seventies and I was reminded of the importance of travel and exploration for the body and mind. What I was expecting; a memoir of hippie-esque travels of free-love and discovery was anything but. It really did contain the bricks and mortar, good and bad experiences (woah, one really bad experience!), which maketh the man. I've not visited South America or Istanbul, nor even Amsterdam. The vivid descriptions of these exotic sounding far-flung lands incited wanderlust.
 
A beautiful, if unexpected, book about love and self-discovery.
 
VERY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
 
Thank you so much the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with a complimentary electronic copy in return for an honest review.