The Zahir in Paulo Coelho

Nov 17, 2010 Manayer rated it it was amazing

This book is something else.

The story is about an author who lived and loved his wife for 10 years, and after that she left him for a younger translator (as he thought) and was apart from him for two years.

In the cover it says that is a novel of obsession. Well, to me, it was far far beyond just that.
The novel was very true that for a minute, it seemed to me that several people gathered and wrote this book. Paulo and other people who understood the word Love.
The story is about this author, who i This book is something else.

The story is about an author who lived and loved his wife for 10 years, and after that she left him for a younger translator (as he thought) and was apart from him for two years.

In the cover it says that is a novel of obsession. Well, to me, it was far far beyond just that.
The novel was very true that for a minute, it seemed to me that several people gathered and wrote this book. Paulo and other people who understood the word Love.
The story is about this author, who is the narrator that I still don't know his name. He basically is Paulo himself. But of course it is not a true story.
As accustomed from his novels, he speaks about different things that related eventually and showed us where he was going.
In this novel we walked with the narrator and witnessed day by day the battle of pursuing one's self, without even recognizing what's wrong with him. Love is what led him to finding himself. To me, it is a story of love. Love of anything, My Zahir was certainly not Esther or any other person. Your Zahir is something else, but we all seek some thing. A person, a thing, and maybe a concept. We are all going in the same path, looking for the same thing. Satisfaction, finding ourselves, not regretting. I think it was mainly what Esther did, she was afraid of regretting neglecting the feeling of unhappiness with this man she loved, so she stepped up and left him to find himself in order to find her.

The spirituality that Mikhail and all of the characters showed in the chapters is something I think we all need. I think the reason why Esther went to the steppes because she needed that kind of spirituality, she was a kind of a pilgrim herself. She needed to meditate, and to leave space for her husband to meditate.

The author left it to us to believe wether Mikhail had heard voicer or not, the narrator did believe. To me, it isn't important if it was true or not, if he really did see the visions of he was just symptoms of his disease. What is important to me that we he heard-or thought he heard-had led him to a goal. Gave him a purpose. Showed him that love is the secret of life.

While reading this book, I myself had found myself in several of paragraphs, and that's why I thought that it was written by several people. Because the narrator went through ups and downs, hates and loves, and through a lot of changes. As Mikhail said in the end of the book, he isn't the man he previously met.

It's weird, because before reading this book I have been reading a lot and thinking a lot about society and the invisible obligations it sets for us, that we have to follow and if we didn't we were to lose ourselves and our pride, and then I read this book that also told me that these obligations aren't true, aren't there, we're just fooling ourselves. These rules weren't what we wear made to follow, we are free to follow our own rules. He also showed me that the past that created these rules and traditions should be forgotten, even our own past, our own past that through time gave us instructions into the future, we have to let it go in order to let the energy of love soak in.

The book, as the narrator said, if the message in the book were to be written in just few sentences, he would've saved the time and just wrote a few sentences. You NEED to read this book. :) ...more

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