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khiemtranAmongst the books I read over the holidays was The Zahir, by Paulo Coelo.
A man, a successful author, finds himself arrested after the disappearance of his wife. What do you think happens next? In a typical plot-driven story, he might face a battle to clear his name, or escalating threats as he tries to hunt down the real killer or rescue his wife from kidnappers, or even face a battle with the wife herself after her devious attempt to frame him.
Instead, he gets freed and removed from suspicion by the first page and then goes to sit in a café near the Eiffel tower for the next chapter or so. This isn't a spoiler, BTW, the broad outline is spelt out on the cover blurb.
This is very much a story about an internal journey and, despite a lot of my misgivings, it's an engaging one. The narrator is self-obsessed and self-indulgent. That's okay. The book is about obsession. The main character is a wildly successful author with a millionaire lifestyle who succeeds almost without trying and is fawned on wherever he goes. It's written by a wildly successful author with a millionaire lifestyle who is fawned on wherever he goes. The majority of the plot is just an excuse for the character to either hear or give lectures and tell stories. They're all interesting stories. The entire crisis (and this is not really giving much away either) is largely engineered by the characters themselves as part of their spiritual journey. That's just the sort of thing these characters would do. They're that sort of character.
What the characters do have in their favour is that they are all very watchable. None of them are passive, even if the plot is hardly a thrill a minute. They don't just react, they each add things to the story. They are all interesting people, the sort of people who stand out at a dinner table. Likewise, while the narrator is very much a selfish, flawed character, he is likeable because we can see him struggling towards something, even if he's not quite sure what it is.
And, while whole thing may sound like a pretentious exercise, in a funny sort of way, it's not. The internal journey, contrived as it is, really is the focus of the novel. There's no attempt to dress it up in external events or to draw the personal journey out of a external conflict. It's all there is, and it never pretends to be anything else.
A man, a successful author, finds himself arrested after the disappearance of his wife. What do you think happens next? In a typical plot-driven story, he might face a battle to clear his name, or escalating threats as he tries to hunt down the real killer or rescue his wife from kidnappers, or even face a battle with the wife herself after her devious attempt to frame him.
Instead, he gets freed and removed from suspicion by the first page and then goes to sit in a café near the Eiffel tower for the next chapter or so. This isn't a spoiler, BTW, the broad outline is spelt out on the cover blurb.
This is very much a story about an internal journey and, despite a lot of my misgivings, it's an engaging one. The narrator is self-obsessed and self-indulgent. That's okay. The book is about obsession. The main character is a wildly successful author with a millionaire lifestyle who succeeds almost without trying and is fawned on wherever he goes. It's written by a wildly successful author with a millionaire lifestyle who is fawned on wherever he goes. The majority of the plot is just an excuse for the character to either hear or give lectures and tell stories. They're all interesting stories. The entire crisis (and this is not really giving much away either) is largely engineered by the characters themselves as part of their spiritual journey. That's just the sort of thing these characters would do. They're that sort of character.
What the characters do have in their favour is that they are all very watchable. None of them are passive, even if the plot is hardly a thrill a minute. They don't just react, they each add things to the story. They are all interesting people, the sort of people who stand out at a dinner table. Likewise, while the narrator is very much a selfish, flawed character, he is likeable because we can see him struggling towards something, even if he's not quite sure what it is.
And, while whole thing may sound like a pretentious exercise, in a funny sort of way, it's not. The internal journey, contrived as it is, really is the focus of the novel. There's no attempt to dress it up in external events or to draw the personal journey out of a external conflict. It's all there is, and it never pretends to be anything else.
