The pilgrim’s progress continues as Paulo Coelho sets his reader on a new exploration of life in his latest novel, The Zahir. Responsive to the wisdom that comes with experience, he quotes from Constantine Cavafy’s Ithaca to explain the nature of his protagonist’s pilgrimage,

When you set out on your journey to Ithaca,
pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge…

To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.

That’s what the renowned but unnamed writer tries to do when he discovers that Esther, his wife, a war correspondent has disappeared from his life and left him a “free man”. “Freedom. The freedom to be wretchedly alone”, as he says. But this is only the initial stage of a quest just begun. Unconscious, undefined and unrealized for “a man abandoned”.

With time, he becomes more successful and finds a new love in Marie but the sudden disappearance of his wife continues to intrigue the restless writer. Her physical presence is now replaced by a spiritual absence in his life - he remains mystified and perturbed for her attraction is now even stronger.

The pensive author’s countless questions to himself haunt the reader too about the mesmeric and destructive power of love. In a redemptive effort to resurrect this loss, Esther becomes the Zahir for the brooding writer. “Zahir, in Arabic, means visible, present, incapable of going unnoticed. It is someone or something, which, once we have come into contact with them or 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.”

His maddening search thus finds a direction when he meets the epileptic storyteller, Mikhail, with whom Esther has supposedly made that cryptic move away into an enigmatic land. To fathom the unfathomable, the author embarks on a hurried journey only to realize the futility of it all. He meets with an accident and his confrontation with the forces of death leads to the only realization that we all need in life. “If I was to see her again, my face needed to be clean as hers. Before I could find her, I must first find myself.”

A voyage for love, a voyage for truth, a voyage for self-discovery. All that the pilgrim does now is listen to his “inner voice”. The physical journey from South America to Spain, France, Croatia and finally, the bleakly beautiful steppes of Central Asia takes him forward to a universe within…

By the time the readers reach the last page, “the energy of love” has woven its magic on them. We all have the longing for this spiritual adventure in our lives – only a crisis in love leads us to an understanding of the true meaning of it all.

The narration moves beautifully through the sufferings and ecstasies of the estranged writer. Just when we think the pace of story telling slackens, Paulo Coelho makes the reader curious with the introduction of a new character(s) - unknown for the writer, who encounters them for the first time, but known to his wife for she has transformed their lives. We feel some of the most fascinating moments during the story-telling sessions conducted by Mikhail in a bar and in the writer’s interaction with the beggars.

Like The Alchemist and Eleven Minutes, the reader relives yet another pilgrimage with the protagonist in The Zahir but once again it is a journey that leads to new self-discoveries and insights to live a more intense and fuller life.

Reviewed by Satarupa Ray
Designed by Subhadip Mukherjee