Book depicts human emotions. Human emotions are layers. Inspiration derived from obsession. Zahir is external thought that manifest itself in one’s consciousness. Book is the journey of an insolent man. Journey of writer who would be willing to do anything in the sake of love

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3. The Zahir
By Paulo Coelho

4. Introduction:
The Zahir is a novel written by the renowned Brazilian author Paulo Coelho. The book
was first published in 2005 in Persian in Iran.
The Zahir is a novel about a pilgrimage, or a holy journey, a theme touched upon in one
of Coelho's other works as well. The protagonist is a prominent novelist who’s the Zahir has
been translated into more than forty different languages since its initial publication.

5. According to Coelho, “Zahir, in Arabic, means visible, present,
incapable of going unnoticed.
It is someone or something which, once we have come into contact
with them or it,
gradually occupies our every thought, until we can think of nothing
leeks his wife, Ester,
who disappeared one night. Over the course of the novel, the
protagonist comes to terms
with his wife's odd abscondence, as well as the factors that might have
played into it.

6. Characters
The Narrator:
The narrator, a best-selling novelist is the protagonist of the story. His wife of ten years
has left, leading him to question his entire life. He begins a journey to find his wife and,
in the process, realizes that to find her he must find himself.
Esther:
Esther is the wife of the narrator who goes missing. She is a war correspondent,
thirty-three years old, married and without children. Moreover, Esther is smart, calm,
and courageous in her actions.

7. Mikhail:
He is described as a male with dark, Mongolian features between twenty-three and
twenty-five years of age. He is Esther's translator and was the last person to be seen
with her.
Marie:
She is a thirty-five-year-old French actress whom the narrator falls in love with after
Esther goes missing.

8. Summary
The book is a pilgrimage of love and loss—a journey which yields
self-discovery and spiritual growth.
Narrator is a protagonist, a world-famous author who closely
resembles Coelho, narrates the story as he attempts to find his
wife, Esther, who has disappeared from their Paris home without
explanation. A worldwide best-selling writer, the narrator is
wealthy and well known.

9. The narrator keeps thinking about his wife who is missing and
was last seen with a man named Mikhail. Police arrests him but
he is released soon after a woman whom he had been sleeping
with provides witness to his presence. He wonders about his life
before he met her, his unconventional journey and how she
encouraged him to be a writer. He believes she has left
him as she had taken her passport and some other belongings.
He doesn't want to find her and he has done this ritual before
with his other wives and comes to realize that the two had been
growing apart. This led him to wonder if he, and she, were free
from their spouse, what did that meant, freedom to explore life or
loneliness. Freedom is not the absence of commitments, it's
rather the freedom to choose and being able to commit to
what is best for you

10. Han's Question:-
In Buenos Aires, the Zahir is a common 20-centavo coin; the
letters N and T and the number 2 bear the marks of a knife or a
letter opener; 1929 is the date engraved on the reverse. (In
Gujarat, at the end of the eighteenth century, the Zahir was a tiger;
in Java, it was a blind man from the Surakarta Mosque who was
stoned by the faithful; in Persia, an astrolabe that Nadir
Shah ordered to be thrown into the sea; in the Mahdi's prison A
year later, I wake thinking about the story by Jorge Luis Borges,
about something which, once touched or seen, can never
be forgotten, and which gradually so fills our thoughts that we are
driven to madness. My Zahir is not a romantic metaphor—a blind
man, a compass, a tiger, or a coin. It has a name, and her
name is Esther.

11. There is much scandal around Esther's disappearance, and the author starts obsessing about
her, calling her, his Zahir, something that is obvious. People keep piling around him due to
different reasons but mostly because of the scandal. He soon learns to control his obsession
around people, gets in a new relationship with an actress, and after much dwelling gets inspired
from a cathedral restoration and writes a new bestseller, talking about his love to his wife.To
distract himself from the lingering sense of guilt and loss, the narrator begins a new affair with
Marie, a beautiful, young actor. The restoration of a cathedral serves as his inspiration for a new
novel, an emotionally charged work largely about his love for Esther.
At a book-signing, he meets Mikhail and after Marie's encouragement decides to confront
Esther. He decides to meet him at a restaurant where he held weekly meetings discussing love
and stories. He invites Mikhail for lunch and tries to persuade him to take him to Esther. Mikhail
has an epileptic fit and leaves. The narrator goes to another weekly meeting with Marie, where
he tells his views on how the train tracks symbolize an ever-stable relationship. Later that night,
he convinces Mikhail to tell him the address of Esther. However, Mikhail tells him that he is told
by the Voice that the time is not right.

12. Next day, he has an accident. He takes the accident as a sign that the time was no right to meet
Esther. He realizes that Esther was much better than him and to get back with her he would
have to be as much evolved as her. There are two kinds of world: the one we dream about and
the real one. In my dream world, Mikhail had told the truth: I was just going through a difficult
patch, experiencing the kind of misunderstanding that can occur in any love relationship The
narrator eventually decides to go in search of his Zahir. As it was Esther who had initially brought
Mikhail from Kazakhstan to France, the protagonist suspects that she may in fact be in
Kazakhstan. At first, he is curious about what made Esther leave, but later he realizes that
troubles in her relationship with her husband may have been a major reason. As he discovers,
she was interested in getting to know herself through the making of carpets. Eventually the
narrator meets his Zahir and the outcome of this meeting constitutes the climax of the book.
Through the narrator's journey from Paris to Kazakhstan, Coelho explores the various meanings
of love and life.

13. Ariadne's Thread:-
I am born in a small village, some kilometers from a slightly larger village where they have a
school and a museum dedicated to a poet who lived there many years before. My father is
nearly fifty years old, my mother is twenty-five. They met only recently when he was selling
carpets; he had traveled all the way from Russia, but when he met her. he decided to give up
everything for her sake.
He decides to attend more 'meetings' with Mikhail and learns about love and the sadness his
wife had been feeling in their relationship. After an incident where he walks over thin ice and
doesn't get wet, he takes it as a sign to see Esther. Mikhail convinces him to take him along. The
narrator and Marie say goodbyes when they realize that narrator still loves his wife. After
decades of religious repression in Kazakhstan, mysticism and the esoteric are now very
fashionable in Almaty.

14. I have to write an important article for a magazine that is one of my major creditors in the Favor
Bank. I have hundreds, thousands of ideas in my head, but I don't know which of them merits my
effort, my concentration, my blood. The possible conversation during journey goes to like.
"That is why it is so important to let certain things go. To release them. To cut loose. People
need to understand that no one is playing with marked cards; sometimes we win and sometimes
we lose. Don't expect to get anything back, don't expect recognition for your efforts, don't
expect your genius to be discovered or your love to be understood. Complete the circle. Not out
of pride, inability or arrogance, but simply because whatever it is no longer fits in your life. Close
the door, change the record, clean the house, get rid of the dust. Stop being who you were and
become who you are."

15. The Return to Ithaca:-
The narrator arrives in Kazakhstan along with Mikhail and get in touch with Dos whose
grandfather Esther had been seeking to understand her restlessness .We were in a kind of
bunker, which looked like a relic from the Second World War. A man, with his wife and his
granddaughter, welcomed us and showed us a simple, but spotlessly clean room. . The three
travel to steppes to a village where Esther is learning to make carpets and teaches French. Dos
has the narrator choose a new name for his experience. He chooses the name 'nobody' alluding
to Ulysses. He finally meets Esther after having been re-discovered the concept of love.
I finds her waiting for him and informs him of having taken Dos as a lover and of being pregnant
by another man. The narrator gets heartbroken but informs him that his editor wants him to
cover another war, which her feels she shouldn't do given her condition. However, she just asks
for a second horse to leave

16. LEARNING OUTCOMES

17. Fidelity
 The novel is about to fidelity
 It discuss fidelity in number of shades
 Fidelity ties a person to the relationship

18. Love and obsession
• This story about love among the couple
• The word zahir literally means obvious
• It is inspiration that is derived from obsession and very well known
about human emotions such as love, warmth, sadness and happiness

19. Spirituality
• Another major lesson is spirituality
• The narrator is not a religious person but he believes in mystics of life

20. CRETICAL
REVIEW

21.  Book depicts human emotions.
 Human emotions are layers.
 Inspiration derived from obsession.
 Zahir is external thought that manifest
itself in one’s consciousness.
 Book is the journey of an insolent man.
 Journey of writer who would be willing
to do anything in the sake of love.

22. I LIKE THE MOST
• Zahir the novel of love and obsession.
• Helps the reader what is life.
• How to care of each other in love.
• Word love is repeated mostly.
• According to writer if you have true love you can do anything.
• People need to understand no one is playing with marked cards.

23. I DON’T LIKE
• Women leaves her husband with no explanation.
• Leaving with and message or note.
• Writer needs her wife’s love.
• Writer mostly repeated the word spiritually.
• Instead of having wife he keeps relationship with another women