The Archer
by Paulo Coelho
illustrated by Christoph Niemann
translated by Margaret Jull Costa
2020

I picked this up randomly at the library when I was searching for something else, and I’m glad I did. It’s a short book (only 160 pages) with beautiful illustrations, and it feels like a combination of Zen and the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. The text is not quite poetry, but I want to refer to the verses rather than paragraphs, due to the care and curation that has gone into the prose. It’s a short book but not a quick read, not because it’s difficult but because it leads me to slow down and take breaks and think about what it’s saying.

It has an extremely basic framing story where a boy discovers that the local carpenter in his little village is a famous archer, and asks him how one masters archery. The archer says that he can tell the boy how in an hour, but doing so takes years. The bulk of the book is made up of the short descriptions on what it takes to master a skill and thus master oneself. It’s essentially a book of meditations, with the skill of archery being itself a framework for self improvement.

The framing story sets this book as fictional with characters and events — that was what had originally drawn me to it and I enjoyed both the opening and the closing chapters — but it feels more like nonfiction to me. This book consists of the advice man gives to a boy about how to live a good life: how to be a bow, aim an arrow, pick a target, and be respectful of it all.

Also, the illustrations really are gorgeous, in a very simple style.