Ann-Marie Eldon has work on 5 Trope, Argotist, Avatar Review, Caffeine Destiny, Can We Have Our Ball Back, Lily, Mipo, Maegera, Moria, Niederngasse, Nth. Position, Tears in the Fence, xPressed, zafusy etc. She edits Web Del Sol's poetry forum Writers Block and is contributing editor for Sentinel Poetry.
With a cargo now of concrete
and iron rods, now of Dutch water-heaters,
German radios, Japanese tv’s,
he clocks up umpteen kilometres
weekly. Embellishing his windscreen,
one sticker’s mottoed, ‘I love the Philippines’;
another features a dozing Garfield the Cat
plus the caption, ‘Homesick, Do Not Disturb’.
Ramadan or Dhu al-Hijja, read here his ensigns
hoisted across desert oceans, reminders
The Hungarian waitress is the only one
who understands even a little English
as two Japanese newly-weds put on
a lesson in etiquette so deeply elaborate
it might be ritual, a free table-show
that has the locals laying down their forks,
just short of applause: Tenderness squared,
how in turn she serves him, he serves her,
now improvises a spaghetti sandwich,
now pours twin-glasses of cut-price wine
three-wheelered in weekly from Frascati:
‘Brindisi!’/ toasts all round: A Peruvian
and then this British divorcee grin
ruefully from our separate corners.
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.