Abandon
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
From the national bestselling author of The Half-Known Life comes an intoxicating novel that's at once a stylish intellectual mystery and a pulse-quickening love story—the love in question being at once sacred and profane.
John Macmillan, a classically reticent Englishman who has moved to California to study the poems of the Sufi mystic Rumi, unexpectedly becomes involved in two equally absorbing quests. The first is for a mysterious Rumi manuscript that may have been smuggled out of Iran; the second for the elusive Camilla Jensen, who continually offers herself to him only to repeatedly slip from his grasp. Are these quests somehow related? And can Macmillan give himself over to them without losing his career and identity?
Moving deftly from California academia to the mosques of Iran, filled with insights into the minds of Islam and the modern West, Abandon is a magic carpet-ride of a book.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Framed by the conflict between Islamic and secular Western values, this novel from travel writer, critic and novelist Iyer (Cuba and the Night; The Global Soul; etc.) is part mystery, part spiritual coming-of-age tale and part romance. John Macmillan is a student at a Santa Barbara, Calif., university trying to finish his thesis on the lesser works of Sufi master Rumi. John begins searching the globe for a secret Islamic manuscript, reputedly smuggled out of Iran after the Shah's downfall, that may contain lost poems by Rumi. He travels through Syria, Iran, Spain and India; though the search is mostly fruitless, along the way he finds himself drawn into a romance with the flighty, fragile, slightly New Agey Camilla Jensen. At first the affair seems a trifling distraction, but as Macmillan's academic investigation stalls, he finds himself falling in love; Camilla, for her part, turns out to know much more about Sufism than John could have suspected. As he tries to get to the bottom of her connection with his field of study, she suddenly disappears. Iyer's intellectual detective story evolves into a deeper probing of love, spirituality and the clash of two world views. Without being forced or didactic, Iyer explores American ideas and misconceptions about Islamic faith, while exposing the political corruption that continues to plague many Muslim countries. Though the book is obviously timely, it never feels as though Iyer is mining the headlines for material. Perhaps its greatest achievement is the evolution of the deep, passionate love between John and Camilla, which Iyer renders with grace and psychological acuity.
