Al-Zuhair - Paulo Coelho

Her name is Esther, she is a war correspondent who just returned from Iraq due to the imminent invasion of that country, she is thirty years old, married, with no children. He is an unknown man, between twenty-three and twenty-five years old, with dark skin, and features similar to Mongolian people. The two were last seen together in a café on street, in Foubour Saint Onore. She told the police they had met before, but no one knows how many times: Esther always said that the man, whose real identity she concealed behind the name Mikhail, was very important, but she never explained whether it was important for her work as a journalist or for her as a woman. The police began an official investigation, proposing different theories – kidnapping, extortion, kidnapping leading to murder – none of which exceeded the bounds of possibility, because Esther, in her work searching for information, was subject to repeated contact from people linked to terrorist units. The police discovered that in the weeks before her disappearance, there were regular withdrawals of money from her bank account, and the investigators felt that this money might have been payments made in exchange for information. She did not take any clothing suits with her, but it is very strange that her passport was not found. He is an unknown young man, in his early age, with no criminal record, no indication of his identity. And she is Esther, in her thirties, a two-time international journalism award winner, and she is married. She is my wife. As usual, Quixote begins his story with innocence: a famous writer, abandoned by his wife without any reason... and instead of continuing his life with a replacement, he is overwhelmed by a single obsession that disturbs him and keeps him awake: "Why did my wife leave me?" After that, nothing remains innocent: a cascade of deep philosophical ideas descends. Ideas that have occupied and still occupy all humanity: how a certain obsession suddenly stands before a person, controlling him so that it becomes everything, and nothing else. And how war, only war, exposes hidden human feelings and takes them to the furthest extent. And how a set of inherited values that a person believes in enslaves him, dedicating himself and what he has, and what he does not have, for their sake, and they become the justification for his persistence and struggle. And he can no longer stop to ask: does he feel happiness or not? In the end, the author wears the cloak of the wise man, who wants us to see and not just look; he pushes his readers to answer the questions he faced once and answered. It is a novel about psychological liberation. The End. - Paulo Coelho