Coelho's navel gazing

The Zahir, Paul Coelho, translated by Margaret Jull Costa. Harper Collins, 2005

The Zahir is the first book by Paul Coelho that I have read. I’ve seen his name often enough on the bookshelves but never felt the need to know more. Perhaps that had something to do with the off-putting esoteric nature of the titles – The Alchemist, The Valkyries and so on. But this book was given to me by a dear friend and I had a long flight home from Beijing, so . . .

Let me put it bluntly. This is also the last Paul Coelho book that I will read, unless either he or I undergoes a radical transformation - and I can’t see that happening. Paul Coelho’s philosophy, if one can call it that, or his spiritual quest is as far from my tastes as bacon from a synagogue. The Zahir is a search for love gone wrong and a paean to a variety of rituals, which somehow are meant to amount to a comprehensive spiritual world view. To me it amounted to a pretentious bore.

Throughout my reading of the Zahir I had a nagging feeling that it reminded me of something but I couldn’t put my finger on it. In his author’s note at the end of the book, Coelho was kind enough to solve the riddle for me, attributing one of the rituals in the book to Carlos Castaneda’s Journey to Ixtlan. Carlos Castaneda! The name hadn’t entered my head for over 30 years. Does any one still read Carlos Castaneda, let along mention him in an author’s note?

Sure, I’d been hot and bothered about Castaneda in my late teens and early twenties but I soon got over it. Even then I had been unable to finish his books and his importance was more as a provider of a rationale for taking huge quantities of hallucinogenic drugs than as a spiritual teacher. As addled as my brain undoubtedly was, I couldn’t take his stuff seriously.

But Paul Coelho clearly does; very seriously. Enough said. And I wonder to myself: in a world of Auschwitz, Rwanda and Srebrenica, is not Coelho’s agonizing about love and getting rid of his personal history the mental masturbation of the rich and famous (both Coelho and his protagonist?) Had the Jews, the Tutsis and the Bosnian Muslims being a bit more diligent about getting rid of their personal histories, would Hitler, the Hutus and Milosevic have said “Well now, they’re getting their shit together. I think I’ll let them live?”

Of course that’s not a fair comment to make. Writers are free – must be free – to write about whatever they want. But I can’t escape the feeling that The Zahir is not only trivial and boring, it’s also nasty.

In the positive column, the writing is clear and precise, though almost totally lacking in metaphor, irony or just a little wit. It is also more a tract than a novel; the story line is a very thin covering for the spiritual points which Coelho wants to get across.

No doubt there are many people who thrive on this sort of stuff. For myself, I haven’t disliked a book as much in many years.