Houston Chronicle, TX
Sept 4 2005
Novel’s narrator finds himself
But the reader may be lost on the trip
By DEBRA WEINSTEIN
THE ZAHIR.
By Paulo Coelho.
HarperCollins, 298 pp. $24.95.
The unnamed narrator at the center of Paulo Coelho’s The Zahir:
A Novel of Obsession is an international best-selling novelist who
lives in France and brings in $2 million a year from royalties even
when he doesn’t publish a book. When he publishes a book, he earns
about $5 million. This may be a multimillion-dollar year for Coelho,
who will be publishing an estimated 8 million copies of The Zahir in
83 countries. He is a publishing giant, the author of the self-help
spiritual fable The Alchemist; his publisher claims he broke a
Guinness world record when he signed 53 different language editions
of The Alchemist in one sitting at the 2003 Frankfurt Book Fair.
Coelho’s Alchemist was a lean book about a shepherd boy’s journey
to find treasure buried in the Pyramids; he discovers instead the
treasures within himself. In The Zahir, the shepherd boy is transformed
into a celebrity novelist, and the treasure he’s searching for is
his wife, Esther, a war correspondent who has disappeared. Was Esther
kidnapped or killed, or did she simply abandon a marriage that left
her unfulfilled? It’s a premise rich with inherent drama, but despite
the claims on the dust jacket, it’s not really the story of this novel.
This novel is about the novelist. He’s a man who, since he was a child,
has “fought to make freedom (his) most precious commodity,” who writes
“pages of such genius that even (he) couldn’t understand them.” The
novelist’s life may be empty, but it’s the emptiness of book signings
in mega-stores, lunches with representatives of the film industry and
interviews with journalists asking the same tired questions. When
he’s not thinking about his fame and success, he’s thinking about
Esther ~W his Zahir ~W a concept that roughly translated means his
obsession. Should the novelist go in search of a wife who is somewhere
in the interior of Kazakhstan? Halfway through the book, he still
can’t decide: “Before I could find her, I must first find myself.”
Coelho’s narrator “finds himself” through a host of characters
who serve as the author’s mirror or mouthpiece. You know them
simply through their dialogue, which is indistinguishable from the
novelist’s first-person narration. There is his girlfriend, Marie, a
35-year-old French actress who encourages him to write his next book,
A Time to Rend and a Time to Sew. The book is about his lost wife,
and it becomes an instant best-seller, and Marie isn’t even jealous.
She’s a celebrity, too, so she understands about success, and she’s
also a fan.
Then there is Mikhail, the man with whom Esther has disappeared. He
surfaces in France to offer the narrator his special brand of spiritual
guidance. He’s a performance artist who does group therapy with
unhappily married people in an Armenian restaurant, and he travels
around with a band of homeless bohemians.
When, in the final pages of this meandering book, our narrator finds
his wife, it’s a scene meant to be poignant, but it’s cringe-making in
its grandiosity. Here is Esther, the Zahir, conveniently transported
to where the author wants her, fitting too neatly into the narrator’s
life.
This is the age of the blog, of instant hit-and-run publishing. It’s
easy to put your blah-blah-blah out there for a reading public. But
novels are different; they demand some sort of narrative thread.
Coelho knows this. In one of many asides in a novel of asides,
he writes, “When I used to read biographies of writers, I always
thought they were simply trying to make their profession seem more
interesting when they said that ‘the book writes itself, the writer
is just the typist.'” The Zahir feels a lot like typing.
Debra Weinstein, author of Apprentice to the Flower Poet Z, wrote
this for the Washington Post Book World.