The Zahir
A Novel of Obsession
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4.3 • 107 Ratings
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
"Superabundant talent, stunning originality, an elegant way with words… The Zahir is something more."
— Los Angeles Times
The narrator of The Zahir is a bestselling novelist who lives in Paris and enjoys all the privileges money and celebrity bring. His wife of ten years, Esther, is a war correspondent who has disappeared along with a friend, Mikhail, who may or may not be her lover, sparking a journey of love and loss that will change his life forever.
Was Esther kidnapped, murdered, or did she simply escape a marriage that left her unfulfilled? The narrator doesn’t have any answers, but he has plenty of questions of his own. Then one day Mikhail finds the narrator and promises to reunite him with his wife. In his attempt to recapture a lost love, the narrator begins a path of self-discovery and finds something unexpected about himself.
A haunting and redemptive story about obsession, this work of philosophical fiction explores its potential to fulfill our dreams, and to destroy them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The press chat cites 65 million copies of Coelho's eight previous novels in print, making the Brazilian author one of the world's bestselling novelists (150 countries and 56 languages). This book, whose title means "the present" or "unable to go unnoticed" in Arabic, has an initial staggered laydown of eight million copies in 83 countries and 42 languages. It centers on the narrator's search for his missing wife, Esther, a journalist who fled Iraq in the runup to the present war, only to disappear from Paris; the narrator, a writer, is freed from suspicion when his lover, Marie, comes forward with a (true) alibi. He seeks out Mikhail, the man who may be Esther's most recent lover and with whom she was last seen, who has abandoned his native Kazakhstan for a kind of speaking tour on love. Mikhail introduces the narrator to a global underground "tribe" of spiritual seekers who resist, somewhat vaguely, conventional ways of living. Through the narrator's journey from Paris to Kazakhstan, Coelho explores various meanings of love and life, but the impact of these lessons is diminished significantly as they are repeated in various forms by various characters. Then again, 65 million readers can't be wrong; the spare, propulsive style that drove The Alchemist, Eleven Minutes and Coelho's other books will easily carry fans through myriad iterations of the ways and means of amor.
Customer Reviews
An enjoyable read!
Although I am not in love with the ending, The Zahir is filled with meaningful antidotes on very relatable life lessons. The reader accompanies the narrator's journey through depression, obsession, discovery. I love reading Coelho's books for the simple reason that I am introduced to new interpretations of my own experiences, allowing me to continuously evolve.
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The bad old Paulo
The story line just doesn't seem to gravitates my full attention. I struggle to finish it. I don't recommend. Boring, dry, his worse book.