Portuguese (Language) Contemporary Fiction

The Zahir - A Novel of Obsession

1 stars (Narcissism ne plus ultra) - This guy is so self referential that I kept reading mostly from complete astonishment. I bought this because I had five minutes and twenty choices in an airport; why do other people do it? It is self indulgent navel gazing drivel. Mary 3 stars (Not my Coelho's favourate) - The Zahir did not mesmarize me like Coelho's other books. It is not that it is a bad book, not at all, but I just found it to be below my expectation from a book by Paulo Coelho. 5 stars (A FABULOUS FABULIST COMPELLINGLY READ) - British stage, film and TV actor Jamie Glover gives a sterling performance, immediately intriguing listeners with a mesmerizing story of obsession. Told in the first person by a nameless narrator, Glover ably carries us along on a journey, a search not only for a loved one but also perhaps for meaning, answers to the riddle of life. The narrator is a successful author living in Paris with his wife, Esther, who is an accomplished journalist, a war correspondent. She has just returned from Iraq only to disappear again. It's not known whether she ran away or was kidnaped, whether she is alive or dead. She was last seen with a man younger than she, a man who hid his true identity but was known as Mikhail. Could he be her lover? According to author Coelho the idea of the zahir stems from the Islamic tradition, it means "incapable of going unnoticed. It can refer to an object or a person, and that object or person gradually takes over our every thought, until we are unable to think of anything else. This could be considered a state of holiness or a state of madness." We'll leave it to the listener to decide which description is most appropriate for our narrator as he undertakes a journey to find Esther. He knows that she felt a deep unrest and was unsatisfied with her life, although he cannot comprehend why. He was stunned when she announced that she wanted to become a war correspondent, yet he also understood that h...
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