By the River Piedra, I Sat Down and Wept.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept, by Paulo Coelho. Trans., Alan R. Clarke. New York: Harper Perennial, 1997.

By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept, a sensitive, deeply moving new novel by Brazilian author Paulo Coelho, is sure to become a classic. Coelho is hardly an unknown outside of Brazil. If, in his native country, he has been called a fenomeno editorial, abroad his books have sold more than seven and a half million copies. His writing has been translated into twenty-six languages, and in the United States, The Alchemist was on the bestseller list for weeks. His critics complain that his novels are little more than new-age pop psychology, but Coelho's blend of lyricism, urbane social commentary, and deeply felt spirituality certainly speaks to millions of readers.

Like much of Coelho's fiction, River Piedra takes place outside of Brazil. Pilar is a twenty-nine-year-old graduate student at the University of Zaragoza. An ambitious young scholar, she is emblematic of the modern, middle-class urban dweller. A slave to rules, schedules, and commitments, she drives herself constantly, motivated in large part by the need to satisfy other people's expectations. Nevertheless, when she receives an invitation to hear an old friend lecture in Madrid, she drops everything and goes. She has a few days' vacation, she reasons, and so won't get too far behind.

To her surprise, her friend--with whom she was in love as a child--is now a seminarian and a charismatic healer with a large following. His mission is to promote a broader, more inclusive vision of God. Most religions promote a masculine image of God, he explains, and in Judaism, Catholicism, and Islam men have traditionally been the priests and the formulators of dogma. Yet, to his mind, God is too amorphous and all-encompassing to be delimited by conventional iconography. God must necessarily have a feminine side--a gentle, nurturing, healing side. All great religions represent this womanly side of God in some way, he believes, and in Catholicism it finds expression in the Virgin Mary.

Although she is loath to abandon her work and routine, Pilar accepts her friend's invitation to travel with him through southern France. As they visit monuments and old churches, Pilar feels less and less compelled to return to her hectic life in Zaragoza. Gradually, she learns to let...