Coelho uses Esther’s story as a key to understanding the human condition – man under siege, man under the spell of love, man in conflict, out of love.
Being a journalist means interacting with my kind. I know a few war correspondents who risk their lives every day to bring you news from conflicts in far flung places, dots on a map, without whom only silence or hollowness would exist.
It brings to mind Rudyard Kipling’s lines: “From time to time, God causes men to be born – and thou art one of them – who have a lust to go abroad at the risk of their lives and discover news”.
Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho, like the central character in his book, is a successful and widely acclaimed writer. His character lives in Paris and is married to a war correspondent called Esther.
His life is thrown into disarray when she walks out of the marriage without prior reason, and the man she was last seen with, Mikhail, contacts him promising to take him on the journey to see her.
That journey is so full of difficulties, that like Albert Eistein said, “Adversity introduces a man to himself”, he gets a fresh perspective on himself and his marriage.
Coelho vividly describes Esther all the while, planting doubt on why she left. His brief discussion of the police raises the issue of government sanctioned snooping where “everyone knows everything about everyone”, said in a most unsettling manner, bringing to the mind’s fore the recent issue of Wikileaks founder Julian Asssange and former CIA employee Edward Snowden.
Coelho uses Esther’s story as a key to understanding the human condition – man under siege, man under the spell of love, man in conflict, out of love.
He likens the constant packing for war to a drug, a type of adrenaline that can only be experienced when “you see men at their very limit”, injecting fear of the unknown and faith in God in its purest forms because war inspires belief in a Supreme Being.
Esther’s character was inspired by the Sunday Times correspondent Christina Lamb, soon after an interview she had with the multi-million selling author.
Lamb had just returned from a month-long trip in Iraq, when the pair first met, exchanging e-mails in subsequent months leading to the book, a surprise for Lamb when she received it in her inbox.
The questions of what was true and what was fiction hung in the air then, and now, for any reader immersed in its pages. The book was widely successful, selling more than eight million copies in 44 languages. It was banned in Iran for allegedly being too provocative.
