Rating: ***
Tags: Fiction, General, France, Missing Persons, Large type books, Psychological Fiction, Husband and wife, Psychological, Triangles (Interpersonal relations), Authors, Lang:en
Summary
The press chat cites 65 million copies of Coelho's eight
previous novels in print, making the Brazilian author one of
the world's bestselling novelists (150 countries and 56
languages). This book, whose title means "the present" or
"unable to go unnoticed" in Arabic, has an initial staggered
laydown of eight million copies in 83 countries and 42
languages. It centers on the narrator's search for his
missing wife, Esther, a journalist who fled Iraq in the runup
to the present war, only to disappear from Paris; the
narrator, a writer, is freed from suspicion when his lover,
Marie, comes forward with a (true) alibi. He seeks out
Mikhail, the man who may be Esther's most recent lover and
with whom she was last seen, who has abandoned his native
Kazakhstan for a kind of speaking tour on love. Mikhail
introduces the narrator to a global underground "tribe" of
spiritual seekers who resist, somewhat vaguely, conventional
ways of living. Through the narrator's journey from Paris to
Kazakhstan, Coelho explores various meanings of love and
life, but the impact of these lessons is diminished
significantly as they are repeated in various forms by
various characters. Then again, 65 million readers can't be
wrong; the spare, propulsive style that drove
The Alchemist,
Eleven Minutes and Coelho's other books will easily
carry fans through myriad iterations of the ways and means of
amor.
(Sept.)
Subtitled
A Novel of Obsession, this tale is the philosophical
and spiritual chronicle of one man's quest for
self-discovery. Stunned by his wife's inexplicable
disappearance from their Paris home and immediately suspected
of foul play by the authorities and the press, the unnamed
protagonist, a best-selling writer, is forced to reexamine
both his marital relationship and his own life. What he
eventually discovers with the help of a -mysterious stranger
named Mikhail--a man he suspects is somehow involved in
Esther's disappearance--is that he must first "find himself"
before he can ever hope to find his wife. Although Esther is
physically and emotionally lost to him, he rediscovers her as
he retraces both her footsteps and the disintegration of
their visceral connection. Finally able to release the past
and his anger, he can accept the uncertainty of the present
by traveling to Kazakhstan with Mikhail in search of Esther
and the remote possibility of resurrecting a dormant love. As
in
The Alchemist (1993), Coelho continues to prove
himself a contemporary fabulist, spinning irresistible
stories while seeking enlightenment at the same time.
Interwoven with details drawn from his life, the mesmerizing
narrative offers a highly personal meditation on the meaning
and the power of love.
Margaret Flanagan
From Publishers Weekly
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