Books : The Zahir: A Novel of Obsession (P.S.)

Rating: - Best~!!
I believe it is the best of his books.
After reading, I started thinking about my life.
What do I really want?

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Rating: - Better books in the world than this one
If a zero rating were possible here, this book would warrant it. The author biographical notes indicate that Coelho has sold 56 million copies of his books. On the evidence provided between the covers of this one I can't imagine why: it's hardly artfully written and doesn't have a plausible plot. I guess millions of people around the world eat french fries; they're hardly a complex, tasty gourmet food worthy of rave reviews either. Mass consumption doesn't automatically equal 'must-have' or 'of value'.

The novel features a best-selling writer as a narrator (who incidentally whines about critics trashing his work; Mr Coelho must be feeling insecure) whose wife disappears. The narrator claims that his missing wife is his obsession, his Zahir, yet replaces her with another woman that he also claims to love, and has affairs on the side. I think the only obsession he has is with himself and his own self-importance.

Throw in an epileptic that sees visions, some hokeyness about letting love into your life in a pure energy form, a journey across the steppes, and the narrator explicitly explaining all his life revelations along the way so you don't miss the 'profound messages'; viola, you have one unconvincing story.

I hope the book reads better in the original Portuguese than it does in English. The English translation is dry reading; there's certainly no poetry in the writing, just the verses quoted before the title page.

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Rating: - My first one star review
God, how I hated this book! It starts out OK: a best selling but critically disliked author (the narrator of the book) and his wife become too complacent in their marriage and start taking each other for granted. The wife splits, and, after some serious soul searching, she becomes the author's "Zahir" (which means "obsession" or "great desire." The word is repeated in the book about a thousand times just to clue us in on the profundity of the concept). He then commences on a spiritual quest to get her back (which, at one of the novel's low points, includes frolicking with insightful street beggars). Less than 100 pages in, the book devolves into a silly philosophical surrealistic dissertation on the "energy of love." I swear, it almost reminded me of that dreadful early 70's musical "Godspell," except without the soundtrack. OK, I get it! We should try to love each other! Why not write a three page essay instead of this la-la land book?

To me, "The Zahir," is an author out-of-control with his self-indulgent egoism. I'm wondering if Paul Coelho believed he would start a movement based on the "energy of love," kind of how Ayn Rand started "Objectivism." Fortunately, the type was large and the chapters short -- otherwise I would never have finished the book.

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Rating: - Not as good as other work by Coelho.
Did you know that the distance between one rail track to another is exactly 4 feet and eight and a half inches? Is the distance between our relationships always such a constant?

The book is about the narrator's search for his missing wife, Esther. He seeks out Mikhail, the man who may be Esther's most recent lover and with whom she was last seen. Mikhail introduces the narrator to spiritual seekers and he embarks on a life changing journey.

The book is about love, marriage, and separation. Like other Coelho books, there is a lesson to learn. However, I did not find this book to be as good as The Alchemist or The Devil and Miss Prym, and certainly not as fast a read. However, people in relationships and those going through separation will probably relate more to the book and thus enjoy it more while picking up some useful lessons! There is no denying that Coelho is a great teacher.

An interesting fact of life he mentions is that many of us have died while living! This statement moved me, and each of us will find a different meaning in it according to how we have lived our life.

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Rating: - A Novel of Egotism
This is not the best I have read from Paulo Coelho, but as always I know I'm going to remember some of the profound messages it portrays. I'm still thinking about `Eleven Minutes' some two years on, and `The Alchemist' was apparently life-changing for many of the 27 million who have read it (so far). Of course the writer has his critics but I wonder if some of those are on his wavelength, or even have the capacity or desire to be. In The Zahir, a man with no name wonders why his wife of ten years has left him, and as is the case with most of Coelho's novels, a pilgrimage begins which leads the central character to question his or her purpose in life and the things that truly matter. In this novel the unnamed man is a very successful writer, which I personally found uncomfortable because I was constantly wondering if this tale was partly or even wholly autobiographical; Coelho acknowledges that at least one of the characters is based on a person with the same name and nationality, and the book itself is dedicated to the author's wife Christina - could she be, in fact, the Zahir who becomes something of an obsession in the unnamed writer's life? Personally I found this lingering doubt to be a distraction, particularly because the writer speaks somewhat arrogantly if not egotistically about his career and achievements, and I would hope that this differs from Coelho in real life.

Despite the theme of love and its eternal energy that we are indirectly urged to embrace, the central unnamed character gives the impression of a man with somewhat shallow feelings; he has been married three times or more and even in his latest marriage he concedes to occasional acts of infidelity which in my view serve to undermine his credibility as a man worthy of the woman he is married to. He finds new `love' not long after his wife's unexplained disappearance and continues to flirt, or invite sexual encounters, so I for one felt unattached to his emotional dilemma.

In spite of that, there was plenty to make me think about some of those intellectual, philosophical and spiritual issues that seem to occur in most of Coelho's work. Some of his observations border on the cynical, for example his compartmentalisations of relationships in high society or simply between a husband and a wife, the observations made have a touch of condescension about them yet maybe they are more accurate than some of us would like to think. Central to this line of thinking is that age-old question : `What is love?' and to an extent the author tries to offer his ideas of what love is and more often his opinions of the hypocrisies and denials many of us live within during our married lives. As in Eleven Minutes he dehumanises love (or at least our popular conception of it) and presents us with a picture of the love that we can find at the end of a spiritual tunnel, a painful one that we seem to have to traverse in order to find it. It's a difficult subject to approach and is bound to attract criticism but the open-minded reader will find it interesting and perhaps worth pursuing. I don't think I read anything categorically new in The Zahir but it was elegantly written and is a worthwhile read for anyone looking not so much for the meaning of life, but the purpose of it, and the things that really matter.