There are some dazzling books, whose light follows you for a long time after you read them. “By the river Piedra I sat down
and wept” is one of those. Not a surprise: the author is a master of the kind. The narrator, Pilar, using the 1st person, tells the story of a 7 days tour, which leads her from Saragossa to Madrid, where she finds her
childhood love, who became a seminarian, preacher and miracle-worker, and then to Lourdes. He preaches the return of the reign of the god-woman, in the person of a divinized Mary, and the worship of the Immaculate Conception. The two characters, that we follow on their random halts on their “way of cross”, are opposed in an excruciating way on the choices to be made: laic life for the two of them and
sacrifice of the religious vocation for one of them, his engagement in priesthood and renunciation for both of the love they have shared since childhood, her abandonment of her projects of laic life and their embarking together in a divine mission of revelation of the religion of the mother goddess …
The game intensifies from one sacrifice to the next, each one in turn giving the other the gift of themselves, their ideals, and their life. It is Paulo Coelho. The dialogues are superb. The places allow Pilar and her companion (of which the name is never given) to live their double madness in the middle of the world but almost isolated from this world. The shift between the factual, realistic even common details and situations, and the passion of another age, which brings them closer and separates them as the chapters go, gives to the reading of Coelho this impression of strangeness which can only captivate its readers.