The
press chat cites 65 million copies of Coelho's eight previous novels
in print, making the Brazilian author one of the world's bestselling
novelists (150 countries and 56 languages). This book, whose title means
"the present" or "unable to go unnoticed" in Arabic, has an initial
staggered laydown of eight million copies in 83 countries and 42
languages. It centers on the narrator's search for his missing wife,
Esther, a journalist who fled Iraq in the runup to the present war, only
to disappear from Paris; the narrator, a writer, is freed from
suspicion when his lover, Marie, comes forward with a (true) alibi. He
seeks out Mikhail, the man who may be Esther's most recent lover and
with whom she was last seen, who has abandoned his native Kazakhstan for
a kind of speaking tour on love. Mikhail introduces the narrator to a
global underground "tribe" of spiritual seekers who resist, somewhat
vaguely, conventional ways of living. Through the narrator's journey
from Paris to Kazakhstan, Coelho explores various meanings of love and
life, but the impact of these lessons is diminished significantly as
they are repeated in various forms by various characters. Then again, 65
million readers can't be wrong; the spare, propulsive style that drove
The Alchemist, Eleven Minutes and Coelho's other books will easily carry fans through myriad iterations of the ways and means of amor. (Sept.)
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Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
