The Zahir

---

Paulo Coelho writes because he wants to be loved. I read because I want to be interested. At this point it's hard to say which of us is the more disappointed.

A man asks his doctor, an old friend, if he's out of danger after a recent road accident. The doctor replies: 'In the world we live in, if a boy goes out to buy five apples but arrives home with only two, people would conclude that he has eaten the three missing apples. In my world, there are other possibilities: he could have eaten them, but he could also have been robbed; the money he'd been given might not have been enough to buy the five apples he'd been sent for; he could have lost them on the way home; he could have met someone who was hungry and decided to share the fruit with that person, and so on. In my world, everything is possible and everything is relative.'

The unnamed narrator-hero is a world-famous writer about spirituality, who has written a novel about a shepherd who goes in search of his dream, a treasure hidden in the pyramids of Egypt (the story of Coelho's The Alchemist), and also a memoir of walking the road to Santiago - like Coelho's The Pilgrimage. Coelho has subtracted, though, from this self-portrait (and in fact the whole book) any lively detail. The narrator is from an unnamed country rather than Coelho's Brazil. He lives in Paris, but it is a Paris stripped of anything specific. The book eventually relocates to the featureless steppes of Kazakhstan, but the contrast isn't as strong as it needs to be. The narrator maintains that 'the visible world always manifests itself in the invisible world', but it's actually the visible world which gets short-changed here.

Coelho gives his narrator a war-correspondent wife, Esther, who disappears. Gradually he realises that her disappearance is a sort of message, a challenge to him to rethink his emotions and make them worthy of hers. She becomes the 'Zahir' of the title, a blinding obsession. Unfortunately, simply repeating the words 'Esther' and 'Zahir' in close conjunction can't make this persuasive. Lost socks have been sought with more passion than this lost wife. On balance, there's more psychological depth in Calvin Klein's Obsession than in Paulo Coelho's Zahir.

One clue to the awfulness of this book may be that Coelho writes a weekly syndicated column. Anyone who has written a regular column knows that making bricks without straw is an occupational hazard. Coelho seems to have reached a stage where he would hardly recognise straw if he fell over a pile of it.

In his central figure, not-quite-Paulo, he has created (I imagine by mistake) a devastating portrait of a man whose stock in trade is spirituality but who is worldly to his very toenails, exquisitely attuned to his own status. He is constantly reminding himself how many books he has sold, how many languages they have been translated into, and that he is 'despite all the adverse reviews, a possible candidate for a major literary prize'. When he takes up with another woman (strictly to dispel the Zahir, of course), he chooses a successful French actress of 35, on the grounds that she was the only candidate to enjoy his status, 'because she too was famous and knew that celebrity counts'. Celebrity is an aphrodisiac. 'It was good for a woman's ego to be with a man and know that he had chosen her even though he had had the pick of many others.' And the man's ego, does that come into it? Not-quite-Paulo is too gallant to reveal his own age, but if he is indeed a refraction of the author then he is 20 years Marie's senior. It's adorable that he should regard himself so solemnly as the trophy in this pairing.

Source: The Guardian