Brida

An Early Vision

Brida was first published in Brazil in 1990, two years after The Alchemist made Coelho famous, but it is in many ways the work of an earlier creative moment — a writer still assembling the tools that would later produce his most beloved books. The English translation did not appear until 2008, by which point Coelho had sold tens of millions of copies worldwide and his publishers could market almost anything bearing his name. It sold well. It is not, however, among his essential works.

The novel draws on Coelho’s longstanding interest in esoteric traditions — Wicca, alchemy, Tarot, the concept of soulmates across lifetimes — and reads in places like a lightly dramatised spiritual primer. For readers already sympathetic to these ideas, that is not necessarily a flaw. For those who are not, the novel’s metaphysical machinery can feel more asserted than earned.

The Story

Brida is a young Irish woman living in Dublin who feels, with a vague but insistent certainty, that there is more to the world than ordinary life reveals. She seeks out two teachers: Magus, a solitary wise man who lives in the forest and whose first lesson involves standing alone in the dark, facing her fears; and Wicca, a witch who initiates her into the Tradition of the Sun, a path of magic accessed through dancing, intuition, and the body.

Running parallel to her spiritual education is a love story. Brida has a boyfriend she loves but is also drawn to Magus with a pull she cannot explain — because, as the novel’s mythology reveals, a soul’s true soulmate is identifiable by a point of light visible in their left shoulder. Brida, it turns out, is Magus’s soulmate. The complications that follow are real, if somewhat predictable.

What Coelho Does Well Here

The novel is at its strongest in its quieter, more atmospheric passages — a young woman standing alone in a dark forest, learning to trust the night; a dancing ritual that dissolves the boundary between the individual and the universe; the odd, dignified loneliness of a teacher who has waited decades for his soulmate to reappear. These moments carry the hallmark Coelho warmth: simple, unironic, genuinely felt.

The Irish setting also distinguishes Brida from most of his work. The damp forests and ancient stones of rural Ireland suit his mystical register well, and there is a Celtic fairy-tale quality to the best passages that gives the novel its own minor charm.

Honest Assessment

The difficulty is that Brida herself never quite comes into focus as a person. She is curious, brave in a gentle way, and spiritually hungry — but these are qualities, not a character. Compared to Santiago in The Alchemist, whose journey and choices feel earned, Brida moves through her spiritual education more as a vehicle for Coelho’s ideas than as a woman whose specific life we come to understand.

Brida is the kind of novel that rewards readers who come to it already converted — already persuaded by Coelho’s worldview and interested in seeing an earlier, rawer version of his imagination at work. As an introduction to his writing, it is a much weaker choice than The Alchemist. As a fourth or fifth Coelho, for readers assembling a picture of his whole career, it has genuine interest.

Our rating: 3.8/5 — Charming in patches, uneven overall. A portrait of a great popular novelist still finding his form.