Searching for self and his lost love

WHAT does it take for a novelist to vault ahead of mega-sellers such as J.K. Rowling and John Grisham, and to be ranked in 2003 as the year’s top fiction author, based on worldwide sales? Does it require superabundant talent, stunning originality, an elegant way with words?

Perhaps the secret is to have one’s literary finger firmly on the pulse of the era’s angst and yearnings. Or is it simply to have a campfire gift for setting the narrative hook? Or a confident disregard for technical fine points -- such as character development, plausibility, ear for dialogue, avoidance of banalities -- in favor of getting on with telling a story? On the other hand, the key ingredient might be a knack for attention-getting so sharp that, by comparison, Paris Hilton looks like a bungling amateur. Or all of the above.

With estimated sales-to-date of 65 million books, Brazilian-born writer Paulo Coelho stands out in the dispiriting literary marketplace as a shimmering phenomenon -- not unlike certain mysterious figures in his hugely successful novels. (His titles now number around a dozen, “The Alchemist” being the one best-known in the United States.)

Although Coelho nursed an early wish to become an actor or writer, his parents insisted on a university degree. His first helping of fame and fortune came as a lyricist to a Rio de Janeiro rock star. It was only at age 30 that Coelho turned again to fiction. As the narrator of his newest novel, “The Zahir,” exults, after years of “cherishing a dream ... suddenly, the miracle happens ... suddenly, my fingers press down on the keys. The first sentence emerges. Then the second.”

Sensitively translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa, “The Zahir” is something more (or less, depending on your taste) than the label “semiautobiographical novel” would imply. Call it two-thirds self-enchanted autobiography, with a magical-realist fictional twist. The nameless protagonist -- during a shamanist ceremony in the steppes of central Asia he chooses, in imitation of Ulysses, the name “Nobody” -- is a bestselling writer of semiautobiographical fiction, raised in “a country without a literary tradition” but now living in Paris. (Coelho now resides mainly in France.)

The novel opens with the sudden, inexplicable disappearance of his wife, Esther, a prize-winning journalist and war correspondent who has apparently been seeking out theaters of death in hope of finding there what is missing in her life. Was Esther kidnapped, or worse? Was she simply fed up with her self-absorbed mate? (His alibi to the police is that he was bedding a friend of his wife’s at the time of her disappearance.) Has she fallen for someone else -- perhaps the charismatic young man from the steppes with whom she was last seen?

A Zahir, we learn from the narrator, is a Borgesian conceit meaning an object that becomes a consuming obsession. For him, Esther swiftly metamorphoses from the beloved (albeit taken for granted) to “the Zahir beginning to occupy my every thought.” With the hook thus set, the rather spare story of a man’s quest for a lost love -- or at least for the reason why that love went wrong -- proceeds at a dilatory pace that leaves plenty of room for riffs and mini-essays.

The narrator’s main interest is in indistinct (but how could it be otherwise?) intimations from the Beyond: signs and glaring coincidences, “voices” and trances.

The narrator is also very good at deploring. His targets range from the foreigner-ization of the Champs Elysees to conventional marriages, with swipes at witless interviewers, literary wannabes and herd-instinct tourists. The reader-as-intimate is invited to side with his superior sensibility and disdain.

Special sarcasm is reserved for clueless reviewers who, for instance, have dismissed his work as “an escape from reality with a story about love.” To which he shoots back, “as if people could live without love.”

Touche. “The Zahir,” however, turns out to be a novel rather less about love than about a man writing about love. Esther remains a cipher to the end. Perhaps because -- as the narrator solemnly informs us -- “before I can find her I have to find myself.”

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Kai Maristed is a contributing writer to Book Review and the author of several novels, including “Broken Ground.”