The Zahir
By Paul Coelho,
HarperCollins, Rs 295

?Ithaca?, a poem by the Greek poet, Constantine Cavafy, which Paul Coelho quotes in full at the beginning of The Zahir, opens with the line, ?When you set out on your journey to Ithaca/Pray that the road is long.? It is the journey, as Coelho would have us believe, which is important because it defines it own destination.

If myth is, as Roland Barthes explains in Mythologies, ?a perpetual alibi?, Coelho envisions it in the unidentified ?islands of his soul?, the nearest of which he sets out to explore on his ?boat?, called ?The Word?. This is what he says in his foreword (not included in this edition) to The Zahir. In one of his interviews, he calls ?writing? an exercise springing from ?the unconscious?.

The Zahir, which some critics say is a sequel to The Alchemist, is about the spiritual journey of a renowned author which takes him to Spain, France, Croatia and across the central Asian steppes. He is looking for his wife, Esther, a war correspondent who has disappeared. The author chances upon Mikhail from Kazakhstan, who becomes his mentor, as he gradually breaks free from his burden of ?personal history? and recognizes the circulating ?energy of love? which had been missing from his life. The absence of his wife and the consequent journey become, for the author, a kind of ?cathexis?. He gets swept up by the pulsating experience of the ?zahir?, a term taken by Jorge Luis Borges from the Islamic tradition and implying a state ?of holiness or of madness?. This leads the author to his epiphanic vision in the Kazakhstan desert, amidst the ancient ?tengri? culture which, as Mikhail explains, is ?a religion without religion?.

If magic realism is all about discovering points where myth intersects reality and reality becomes myth, The Zahir (ably translated by Margaret Jul Costa) is full of them. Folklores and anecdotes abound and are woven together in the narrative.

The theme of a spiritual voyage along with the motif of a desert (embodying emptiness and infinity), and the mentor-guide conducting the spiritual expedition, recur in Coelho?s fiction. In The Alchemist, the little boy Santiago searches the Egyptian desert for ?the hidden treasure? guided by an alchemist, while in The Valkyris, Paulo and his wife roam the Majave desert to speak to their guardian angels and encounter the valkyries, and The Pilgrimage chronicles a journey in search of a miraculous sword. Despite Coelho?s absorbing storytelling, this betrays a repetitive narrative pattern which may not always hold readers.

Arnab Bhattacharya