One day a famous writer’s wife, Esther, a war correspondent, disappears mysteriously. He has no idea why. With time, he obtains more and more recognition as well as new love. But Esther’s disappearance is alive within him, haunting him, tormenting him.

His travels take him from France to Spain, Croatia and Kazakhstan. He comes across people, places, incidents, and ideas, which allow him to better understand himself and to have a clearer insight into the nature of love.

Paulo Coelho’s The Zahir is about an individual’s journey, his longing, and his obsessive need to make sense of his wife’s desertion. Esther may have disappeared but she permeates the novel with her presence through the narrator’s recollections, feelings, confusions, and a host of nagging questions.

We are told that “Zahir, in Arabic, means visible, present, incapable of being unnoticed. It is someone/something which, once we have come into contact with him/her/it, gradually occupies our every thought, until we can think of nothing else. This can be considered either a state of holiness or of madness.” In fact, their going separate ways turns out to be a real test of survival. Both are, in their own ways, compelled to find the necessary emotional, mental and psychological resources to cope with the challenges and uncertainties that face them.

The introspective journey gives the novel a profound psychological and symbolical dimension. We are taken into the remote corridors of the narrator’s mind as memory after memory, image after image, gradually unfolds. The novel is about love and its absence. It is also, thankfully, about magical landscapes, signs and visions, writing and writer’s block, myth, special gifts, like the ability to hear “the voice”, which is another manifestation of the presence.

<B>Past and present</B>

Coelho gives us a truthful account of the very process of creative writing: the narrator has been commissioned to write an article for a magazine and he is totally lost about how to proceed in spite of thousands of ideas in his head. He feels he has said everything he needed to say, has nothing more to say, having reached his peak. He gets caught in disparate thoughts and goes about his daily activities in frustration. Has Esther become the Zahir, preventing him from concentrating on anything else? He tries reading till he comes across a word, which finally does the trick: it triggers an idea for his article, which gets written soon.

The tension between the past and the present runs through the book, sustaining it, and certain reflections bring this out clearly, “It is always important to know when something has reached its end. Closing circles, shutting doors, finishing chapters, it doesn’t matter what we call it - what matters is to leave in the past those moments in life that are over.”

“Close the door, change the record, clean the house, get rid of the dust, stop being who you were and become who you are,” or the idea of “washing away the darker areas within oneself, forgetting old rules, creating new situations” may seem trite to some readers but may be inspiring to others. What is unmistakable, however, is that they seep into the mind effortlessly, providing food for thought.

When the narrator finally meets his wife, it is to discover that she is pregnant by “someone who stayed for a while and then left again”. Taking out a bloodstained cloth from her pocket, she says, “Ask Mikhail to get another horse.” He blesses her as he is blessed. This suggestive ending invites the reader to fill in certain details for himself, freeing the author from the burden of having to explain everything.

We learn from Coelho’s website that once he heard an interviewer asking Paul McCartney if he could sum up the Beatles’s message in a few words. How can anyone sum up a body of work in a few words? wondered Coelho. But Paul said, “Yes, I can. All you need is love. Do you want me to say more?” The interviewer said no. There was nothing more to be said.

“The Zahir” could be summed up in the same way, claims Coelho. Compelling themes and engrossing narration apart, it is the pleasant language that rivets your attention.

<B>Suresh RAMPHUL</B>