Stephen Hayes reviewed The Zahir by Paulo Coelho
None
3 stars
I can't decide whether this is a profound book or a superficial one.
The protagonist is a novelist living in Paris, rather like the author himself, whose wife disappears without a trace, and he becomes obsessed, not so much with finding her as with discovering why she left him. This leads him to some deep (or shallow) philosophical reflection, from which he concludes that in order to discover himself as a person he needs to forget and erase his personal history.
Since the protagonist is a writer and in many ways resembles the author, I fount parts of it have me an incentive to work on things that I myself am writing. Those bits made me want to give it four stars. But part of his personal history, which he wants to erase, is that his wife was the one who inspired him to write in the first place, and …
I can't decide whether this is a profound book or a superficial one.
The protagonist is a novelist living in Paris, rather like the author himself, whose wife disappears without a trace, and he becomes obsessed, not so much with finding her as with discovering why she left him. This leads him to some deep (or shallow) philosophical reflection, from which he concludes that in order to discover himself as a person he needs to forget and erase his personal history.
Since the protagonist is a writer and in many ways resembles the author, I fount parts of it have me an incentive to work on things that I myself am writing. Those bits made me want to give it four stars. But part of his personal history, which he wants to erase, is that his wife was the one who inspired him to write in the first place, and when he goes on about that, in a rather banal and boring way, I want to give it one or two stars. In the end I compromised and gave it three stars.
