cr01's Full Review: Paulo Coelho - El Zahir/ the Zahir
It’s not a terribly good sign when the book you finished reading a scant few days ago is already a bit of a distant blur. Brazilian author Paulo Coelho’s The Zahir is named after an Islamic concept. A Zahir is a thing or person that becomes an obsessive subject for someone, an all-consuming item in the mind where reality plays less and less a role.
Alas for Paulo Coelho, his book appears to have formed an almost directly opposite concept in my mind. Ho hum, but a couple of stars for effort.
The plot
Our narrator is a famous and successful foreign language author living in Paris. I don’t believe the book gives him a name, so I’ll call him Paulo. He has a wife (Esther) who has a fulfilling career as a war journalist and who turns a blind eye to the affairs that our narrator partakes in. You might think Paulo has it all.
After a period of growing discontentment, Esther suddenly disappears. Paulo has a successful period writing another book and picking up another live in lover, a successful actor, Marie. You might think our Paulo has it all.
Over time, Paulo discovers that he is thinking of Esther, he loves her, and he is seriously curious about where she has gone and why she left him. Esther becomes Paulo’s Zahir.
One day at a book signing, he meets Mikhail, a young man who was a journalistic contact of Esther. Mikhail tells Paulo that Esther is alive, well and that he knows where she is.
The book follows the story of Paulo as he grows and develops. It turns out that Mikhail is something of a philosopher and a mystic; he encourages Paulo to discover who he is and whom he needs to be to gain Esther’s love before he can rejoin her.
The philosophy of The Zahir is that in order to love, you first have to cease to be who you are. To remove who you are, you have to share your story, remove it, and develop a new you.
If you don’t want to find out too much more about the plot of the book, turn your head away now, and use the scroll bar….
Paulo also discovers things about Esther that he never knew. Esther had a penchant for distributing pieces of cloth to her closest friends, cut from the blood stained shirt of a dying man (funnily enough, it’s something I’m in the habit of doing too…). Perhaps given what Paulo finds out about Esther during this voyage of discovery, he barely raises an eyebrow when he discovers that she is quite content living in a tent on the steppes of central Asia making carpets.
My thoughts
During the reading of the Zahir, I discovered that while you can take the boy (me) from a career in accountancy, you can’t quite remove the accountancy from the boy. Unfortunately, while the Zahir is very clever and nicely written, I found too much of it to be pretentious twaddle for my (staid) taste. My minds eye kept on seeing an old Portuguese language movie droning on and on, while I tried to keep up to reams of subtitles.
I’ve never been one for deep philosophical discussions (it’s just a slippery slope to discontentment). However, for a brief moment, I did actually appreciate the concept that Coelho brings into The Zahir. We are conditioned to strive to be happy, and to seek those things that society believes will achieve a state of happiness. However, we don’t actually stop to think individually about the things we need to satisfy our lives. While I found a couple of the concepts in The Zahir interesting enough, the vehicle of the self centred Paulo and the flighty Esther soon brought me back to earth with a bump. Unfortunately, I couldn’t really relate to either opposites, the leaden automaton, or the impulsive airhead.
Conclusions
I appreciate that The Zahir might be quite the book for some folk; however, I found it just too contrived and forced for my taste. I’m told that Paulo Coelho is an excellent author, and his books sell by the barrow load. I can picture that given the right vehicle, Coelho has the ability to weave quite a tale. Unfortunately, it just appears I made a duff choice for my first Coelho experience.
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cr01 asserts his right to be associated as the author of this review -2007-
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