The Zahir - discussion guide

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Summary

Paulo Coelho’s book The Zahir is the story of an unnamed, internationally famous author who is suddenly abandoned by his wife. Since she leaves him with no explanation for her departure, the author is mystified as well as hurt. The Zahir tracks his journey as he searches, sometimes obsessively, for answers to his questions. As the author’s wife, ‘searches for the truth, he reconsiders his life.’ The unnamed author character isn’t totally unlike Coelho, but neither is he the same person. The book does introduce some of Paulo Coelho’s own spiritual opinions and views as the answers to the unnamed author’s search for answers.

Background Information

The title comes from a story by Jorge Luis Borges. It is one of the stories from his book The Aleph, first published in 1949 and revised in 1974. In the story, the Zahir is an object that has the power to create an obsession. And according to seventeenth century Islamic mythology, the Zahir is an object that traps everyone who so much as takes a look at it, even from afar, into an obsession that finally erases the rest of reality.

Paulo Coelho has become one of the most widely read contemporary authors. He is Special Advisor to the UNESCO programme ‘Spiritual Convergences and Intercultural Dialogues’.[1] Coelho has sold roughly 56 million books and been translated into 59 languages.[2] In 1988–89 with his second book The Alchemist, he hit the number one bestseller in 29 countries. The Zahir, which is Coelho’s twentieth book was published in 38 different languages only weeks after its release. The Zahir has also already beaten Coelho’s own records in each of the countries where it has gone on sale.

Coelho writes with a poetic and philosophical style, often using real life illustrations and symbolism. Coelho is a New Age writer and practitioner[3] and says, ‘The material world . . . all our spiritual quests . . . we have to mix this instead of separating it, and leading a life that is not connected with the spirituality.’[4] At the World Economic Forum, Davos 2005, he said, ‘The real world is us.’ [5] Paulo Coelho’s worldview can be described as monism – the view that everything is of one essential essence, substance or energy. Monism is to be distinguished from dualism, which holds that ultimately there are two kinds of substance – spiritual and physical. For more on monism, see www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monism and for a Christian response to New Age belief, see www.str.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5375.

Paul Coelho’s website is at: www.paulocoelho.com.br/engl

Question for discussion

1. What do you think of the unnamed author? What makes you empathise with Esther for leaving him?

2. What is your favourite stage in the author’s journey?

3. How do you feel about the friendship between the author and Mikhail? If you have changed your opinion during the story can you say why?

4. What does Paulo Coelho say through the unnamed author, his estranged wife Esther and Mikhail about:

   • How we find out who we are?

   • God’s interactions with us

   • The relationship between spirituality and everyday human life

   • Faithfulness and monogamous commitment in marriage

5. What positive and negative things does The Zahir have to say about human beings?

6. Talking about human beings, Paulo Coelho says, ‘We have problems, we are sometimes not as good as we should be.’ Do you perceive this to be correct? If so, can you give an example? How would you feel if Coelho directed this at you personally? What would you say to him?

7. Coelho doesn’t think that our problem of not being as good as we should be is really a problem. Coelho says, ‘This cannot keep us away from the spiritual path. We have to accept ourselves as we are and stop worrying, instead of trying to become perfect.’[6]

What are the other options here? What do we really fear that we will feel about ourselves and our lives if we admit that we are not as good as we know we ought to be?

8. Rebecca Pearson, writing in The Independent, observes, ’The central philosophical idea of an all-consuming passion is a fascinating one.’[7]

What is truly your all consuming passion? What do you love to do or feel? Why?

9. ‘In a certain way I try to share with my readers my inner quest, that's basically my spiritual quest. I don't have anything to teach, I don't have anything to explain about the universe, I don't believe in explanations of the universe, but actually I do have something to share. It is how I am experiencing this strange and sometimes very tricky path . . . by sharing something, I realized that I'm not alone, that there is a lot of people that share with me the same preoccupations, the same ideas, the same ideals, and the same quest for a meaning for this life.’ [8]

How do you feel about the suggestion that you are on a quest for meaning in life? Perhaps you think you have meaning in life – if so, or if not, what are the next steps in your journey?

10. The character of Esther in The Zahir is based on Sunday Times correspondent Christina Lamb. Lamb admitted that she was not unfamiliar with the themes that Esther had to face – namely, the difficulties of being a war correspondent and having a normal home life. Lamb said, ‘I recognise the conflict of what it is like going off and living that kind of life, and then trying to adjust to normal life at home, doing things like the school run.’[9]

What are the extremes in your life?

11. How does Coelho’s view of the world compare with the Bible’s view ofGod creating a world that is separate from himself both physically and, after the fall of humanity, morally? What do you think of Coelho’s ideas?

12. Paulo Coelho says, ‘We are starting to get much more conscious about, you know, the importance of the spiritual path, and we are fulfilling it by paying attention to ourselves, by paying attention to, well, the connection that we have every single day with the soul of the world. We have this language of the omens, the language of the signs . . . if we take the omens as a warning, as a help to cross that particular day, then we start to get deeper and deeper into the soul of the world.’[10]

What do you think about the suggestion that spiritual truths exist? (That is information that is true, that really tells it like it is in the supernatural / spiritual world)

13. Paulo Coelho speaks to the unnamed author through the character of Dos that, ‘He will have to choose a name. He will have to forget for ever his history of pain and suffering, and accept that he is a new person who has just been reborn and that, from now on, he will be reborn every day’ (p. 319). What do you think of the concept of being born again? Read John 3:3–8 Why can’t Jesus have been talking about being continuously born again?

Footnotes

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