![]() ![]() ![]() Because John is failing to make substantial progress in his research, Sefadhi advises him of the need to uncover a hitherto unknown mystical manuscript in order to give body to his thesis. (Rumi, as translated by Ronald Bly, Coleman Barks and others, is currently the bestselling poet in the United States.) John's thesis supervisor, Sefadhi, is an enigmatic Persian in exile. Iyer's protagonist is John MacMillan, a British PhD student at the University of Santa Barbara who is studying the Persian Sufis and in particular 13th-century Sufi poet Jalal al-Din al-Rumi. However, Pico Iyer, hitherto best known for offbeat travelogues evoking exotic airports and shopping malls, has chosen Sufism and, more specifically, the California New Age re-branding of Sufism as the subject of a remarkable novel that tackles such deep themes as sacred and profane love, self-denial and the abandonment of hope and desire. Since the ultimate truths of mysticism do seem to lie beyond human powers to articulate, Sufism would seem to be an unpromising subject for a novel. "If you can't say it, you can't say it, and you can't whistle it either," as a hard-headed contemporary once remarked of the philosopher Wittgenstein's repeated attempts to put the ineffable into words. By Reviewed Robert Irwin February 23, 2003 ![]()
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