Pico Iyer’s intoxicating new novel is at once a stylish intellectual mystery and a pulse-quickening love story—the love in question being at once sacred and profane.
John Macmillan, a classically reticent Englishman who has moved to California to study the poems of the Sufi mystic Rumi, unexpectedly becomes involved in two equally absorbing quests. The first is for a mysterious Rumi manuscript that may have been smuggled out of Iran; the second for the elusive Camilla Jensen, who continually offers herself to him only to repeatedly slip from his grasp. Are these quests somehow related? And can Macmillan give himself over to them without losing his career and identity?
Moving deftly from California academia to the mosques of Iran, filled with insights into the minds of Islam and the modern West, Abandon is a magic carpet-ride of a book.
The New York Times
Iyer charts Macmillan's dilemmas and his slow journey to mystical insight with a sensitivity to mood and landscape reminiscent of that other book by a religiously inclined writer about a lonely Englishman in California: Christopher Isherwood's novel A Single Man. But it is apparent that Iyer wishes to do more than gently usher Macmillan and Camilla toward a Sufi-style redemption: the letting go of fears and certainties and the embracing of passionate love and ambiguity. — Pankaj Mishra
Categories:
- Romance
- Contemporary
Publisher : Vintage
Author : Iyer, Pico
Language : English
Edition : Reprint
Published :2004-04-13
Number Of Pages : 368
Binding : paperback
ISBN-10 : 1400030854
ISBN-13 : 9781400030859
Item weight : 0.62 lb
Dimensions : 0.87 in x 5.2 in x 7.95 in
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