Here, in 20 graceful, witty, prophetic essays, is everything that's good about American journalism (and a rich slice of American society, too). The editor of Harper's magazine writes like a dream, researches like a punctilious professor of classical history and finds his lonely judgments vindicated time and again. The difficulty - and it is a difficulty - is that that good side comes with a greyer side that readers outside America can't ignore, a built-in impotence verging on tragic irrelevance. But let's hit the high spots first.
Nine-year-old Jallal is old enough to know that his life in Algeria is precarious at best -- friends are as likely to kill you as save you. Having run away from home, he lives by selling peanuts and single cigarettes on the street.
Coelho’s narrator tells us “if a book isn’t self-explanatory, then the book is not worth reading” (248). Though such a statement may not appeal to a Formalist critic in the sense that literature should alienate, defamiliarize and make difficult the literary experience, Coelho proves in The Zahir the assumption of his narrator. The book is so simple and its narrative flows so smoothly like a running stream of water in the early months of spring. Coelho’s narrative magically transfixes its readers and absorbs them into the mystical and mythical world of its narrator.
Coelho’s narrator tells us “if a book isn’t self-explanatory, then the book is not worth reading” (248). Though such a statement may not appeal to a Formalist critic in the sense that literature should alienate, defamiliarize and make difficult the literary experience, Coelho proves in The Zahir the assumption of his narrator. The book is so simple and its narrative flows so smoothly like a running stream of water in the early months of spring. Coelho’s narrative magically transfixes its readers and absorbs them into the mystical and mythical world of its narrator.