The Zahir by Paulo Coelho

Have you ever felt like there's something or someone that's always bothering your mind? From the morning that you wake up until the end of the day, there's always something that made you think about that certain thing or person. And it sometimes just consumed your whole mind… Well, that's what this book is about. I found it an amazing reading. Couldn't stop reading and wondered if all of that was real for the author. I believed that the occasion would be different, but the feeling in this book is real. Paulo's have this great ability to captured life in his books.


A Zahir (or sometimes Zaheer) comes from an Islamic folklore about an object that traps everyone who takes a look at it. It made the person obsessed with that thing until the person cannot see reality anymore. In Paulo's case, the zahir was his lost wife (or you may call it ex-wife). After losing his wife mysteriously, I became obsessed to her. The void that his wife made, made him go to a search for her from the beautiful city of Paris to the majestic landscape of Central Asia. At the end, the search has became a search of the truth on his own life and made him understood the nature of love.

I love the story about why the railway tracks is always 143.5 centimeters or 4 feet 8 1/2 inches. It's an absurd measurement, why not make it 150 centimeters or 140 centimeters to be easy? It's funny but it's true and I won't spoiled it here for you.


This is something that Paulo puts it in a way I never thought before but I really agreed:
"The Zahir was a fixation on everything that had been passed from generation to generation; it left no question unanswered, it took up all the space; it never allowed us even to consider the possibility that things could change."
I think I have lived my life that way and I know that others do it too. And I have the feeling that I don't want to be like that, but in the other hand, I feel that I don't have the power to change it. It's a search that I owe myself and I will go for it.

When I read a book that connects me in a certain way, I always wondered if my story will end up the same. To be honest, I don't really like the ending of this story, but the journey itself is a wonderful journey to be followed.

It is always important to know when something has reached its end. Closing circles, shutting doors, finishing chapters, it doesn't matter what we call it; what matters is to leave in the past those moments in life that are over.
~Paulo Coelho, The Zahir