El Zahir - Your Lonely planet soul travel guide
“It is not life that matters, but the journey”
“We can’t allow ourselves the luxury of being unhappy all the time.”
“There are kinds of world: the one we dream about and the real one.”
“We, humans, have two great problems: the first is knowing when to begin, the second is knowing when to stop.”
...
― Paulo Coelho, The Zahir
Ok, I'll be honest; when I picked up the book from my home library I was more than skeptical (for lack of a more precise word) but also decided to defer judgment until I had fully read the story; after all, I had to quarantine home for a week and there was literally nothing that wasn't utterly garbage on each of the 20 TV channels of our Spanish TV, doesn't matter digital or analog; I set sail determined and decided to verify what was behind one of the most quoted self-help new age gurus, Paulo Coelho.
There is a main storyline shaped by the concept of Zahir: A person, an object, that has the power to obsess everyone who sees it, flooding every aspect of their lives, little by little but merciless, until they end losing their minds.
Jorge Luis Borges, Argentinian author who wrote the original Zahir story masterfully describes this obsession, where he is resigned and desperate, no longer being able to tell apart reality from dream:
"Others will dream that I am mad, and I [will dream] of the Zahir. When all men on earth think day and night of the Zahir, which one will be a dream and which a reality, the earth or the Zahir?"
The novel is a travel book, it was written in different cities and the author uses his experiences to fill the space he needs to complete the hero's quest; in that sense it looks as if he didn't have a lot to tell, apart from borrowing an interesting concept as well as some side stories as Coelho himself acknowledges at the end of the book; in that sense it is a colorful mix of snapshots of different times and spaces together with the usual self discovery that can be found in this kind of literature. I recognize and thank the author for his effort knitting together a story from a bunch of disjointed parts.
