Abandon

Rating:
Summary: Intrigue on the road to Nowhere?
Review: It's a truism to say that the seeker must abandon his ego and identity, that he must become in essence "No One", before the door at which he knocks will swing open. But what awaits him behind the door? Is the seeker's path the road to Nowhere? Although ABANDON is essentially a novelization of this very question, Pico Iyer is too astute to venture a firm reply. "Poems are what we make of them," concludes the protagonist John Macmillan, a student of the mystical Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi. This convenient little formula sums up both everything and nothing, leaving the mystery intact. The question for Iyer's readers, therefore, is whether ABANDON has enough mystery in it to withstand the application of this same formula.

The novel opens with an enigmatic meeting in Damascus between Macmillan and a tightlipped Sufi insider named Khalil. Macmillan seeks out this professor for his insights into the poems and for clues about the location of secret manuscripts. Khalil ostensibly tells him nothing, at least not about what he thinks he's looking for. Instead, Khalil asks him to deliver a gift to a "friend" in California. As one would expect, this apparently tangential mission ends up leading Macmillan to the very heart of his quest. "Sometimes you are inside a circle when you think you're outside it," a stranger informs him.

In his travels (Damascus, London, California, Spain, Delhi, New Mexico, Iran), Macmillan winds his way through a maze that leads from Khalil's unlikely friend, Kristina Jensen, to an even greater mystery. It is not Kristina, but her sister, Camilla, who becomes the key to unlocking the relationship between Macmillan's academic obsession and his spiritual destiny. Camilla is the prototypical woman who fears abandonment and who does everything in her power to turn that fear into a self-fulfilling prophecy. She becomes an increasingly repellent character as the book progresses and it's never quite clear, on the surface of things, why Macmillan falls for her. On another level, however, Camilla represents his "shadow self" (her name, for example, is an anagram encoded Sufi-style in Macmillan's own). As such, she reveals the potential for the vulgarization of Sufi poetry read outside its proper religious context.

After returning to California from Damascus, Macmillan finds himself drawn into the world of underground manuscripts protected by L.A.'s Iranian exile community. It's no accident that the novel is set in large part in California. Iyer spends much time ruminating over the differences between the New World and the Old -- and how the Old is born again in the New. California is like an "ancient version of Spain, done up again, brand-new", a place where "Moorish spirits hid out behind the muscle cars". "Much of the world, if looked at with certain eyes," he writes, "resembled a carpet with Islamic threads in every corner." Indeed, from the Shia mosque in Damascus to the Alhambra palace in Granada, from the Taj Mahal to the Spanish-style architecture of California, Iyer uncovers the world "as a grid of shining correspondences".

Anyone with a mystical bent will uncover a treasure trove of unexpected poetic insights in this book. There's also much to attract those who are powerless to resist the whiff of conspiracy. (Iyer apparently thought it prudent to include a disclaimer to the effect that he's never so much as even met a Sufi!) Every reference in the novel appears ripe with significance and the reader is free to make as little or as much of it as he will. After reading ABANDON, you may find some method to the madness that sees books on Sufism scattered among the New Age and Eastern Religion shelves of your local bookstore, rather than side-by-side with the Qurans and sterner volumes of exoteric Islam. The image of a pre-Revolutionary Ayatollah Khomeini as a mystic poet, "a latter-day Hafiz", is jarring to say the least. As is the suggestion that the Revolution's repression of Iranian Sufis and their texts was a means of bringing the message of Islam to the West in "veiled" form. Sound farfetched? Perhaps, but readers of Idries Shah will already be familiar with the Sufi idea of the scattering of Islamic "seeds" throughout the West dating back to the days of Moorish Spain and the Crusades.

In a world where nothing is what it seems, the conscious refusal to see the true nature of a thing is like a veil between the knower and the known. Does Iyer believe there is anything behind the veil? Or is his position that of Eco in FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM? Is that even the right question? Is it not, rather, a question of whether he succeeds in capturing the Sufi mystique only to fall prey to its vulgarization? Or, does it depend entirely on the reader, as the formula above suggests? The meaning of the poems, Iyer writes, "will fade from view only if those who have eyes to see them fade. If they get translated into languages that have no word for 'fire' of the Sufi kind". In a culture of perpetual adolescence ("California had never learned what to do with limit, and yet without limit there was no faith"), where the only kind of "love" recognized is the romantic kind, a culture in which Rumi has become a greeting card guru, this seems at least possible: "The Sufis never dealt with someone from a culture that hasn't had a chance to grow up or lay down roots."

Despite some awkward literary moments in the encounters between Macmillan and Camilla, Iyer has written a novel of great beauty. He sends the reader away having abandoned certain preconceptions and asking other, new questions. That, surely, is the point.

Rating:
Summary: Much ado about nothing
Review: John Macmillan is a scholar, writing his thesis on Sufi poetry, in particular the Islamic mystic Rumi, at UC Santa Barbara. The thesis must be completed before his return to England, but the work is proceeding well for this dedicated scholar, who travels at the behest of his thesis advisor.

Just returning from India, John is caught in the web of intrigue surrounding Camilla Jensen, a young woman of contradictory traits, whom he meets when delivering a package to her. He is romantically involved with a woman in London, but chooses to ignore this reality as he spends more time with Camilla. The insipid Camilla is more the product of a male-dominated culture than the author's "New-Age" description indicates. Her behavior both attracts and repels Macmillan. Against his better judgment, he is drawn to Camilla's fragile unpredictability and the glimpses of passion she exhibits. In point of fact, she is dependent, childish and singularly unattractive. The romance is hopelessly pedestrian.

Iyer writes with confidence about foreign countries, Islam, Rumi and the shadowy Sufis as Macmillan does Professor Sefhadi's bidding; the professor is, after all, his mentor and necessary to the completion of the thesis. At the professor's request, Macmillan travels to India, Spain and Iran, where he has conversations about manuscripts that may or may not be in circulation. Yet everything in this book is vague, indirect; conversations are purposefully ambiguous, correspondence filled with inconsistencies, as though Macmillan thrives on misdirection. I find myself discomfited, as though I can't trust the author to be truthful. The relationship between Camilla and John may serve as a metaphor for Macmillan's search for the essence of Sufism, the letting go of self, "being" the experience. But it is unclear whether Macmillan is the professor's pawn, Camilla's fool or a man more comfortable with mystery than with answers.

Altough not as impressive as the ubiquitous Rumi, common usage would suggest that "water seeks its own level". Simple, perhaps, but in this case, appropriate. Sacrificing himself on the altar of dysfunction, Macmillan is not grasping Heaven with his new lover; rather he is dancing merrily along the precipice of Hell. Luan Gaines/2004.

Rating:
Summary: Mystical Journey To Nowhere
Review: John MacMillan is an English graduate student in California, working on his thesis. He is studying Sufi poetry, with a special interest in the great Rumi. Camilla Jensen is his off-again, on-again girlfriend, a young lady with--shall we say--issues. Major issues.

John works sporadically on his thesis, runs off to Syria and Spain, looks for lost manuscripts, and accomplishes little or nothing, while ruminating about Sufi philosophy, and trying to make sense of his relationship with Camilla.

Author Pico Iyer is a gifted writer who appears to be intrigued with Sufism. One of the themes of this intriguing novel is the idea of emptiness, of giving up trying to understand. He writes in a rambling, ruminating style which seems to create that very effect. He gives us dialogue in which we are not clear who is speaking. Then he tells us what the characters were thinking. Then he analyzes what their thoughts and actions might mean. Then he takes us on long drives throught the countryside. Sometimes it is hard reading.

Is author Iyer giving us a Sufi teaching story? Or is this, in his own words, pointless mystification? Will John and Camilla ever work out their relationship? Will John ever finish his thesis? Well, you will have to read the book to find out. I found this book hard going and had to force myself to finish it. I'm glad I did, though. I recommend it, but it's not for everyone. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber.

Rating:
Summary: On my top 10 list
Review: Oh my. I read this book and immediately placed it among my top 10, all-time favorite books. And as I read it, I kept slowing down and slowing down, to make it last longer. It is wonderful because it has academic undercurrents -- I learned a bit about the Sufis and about Rumi -- and because of the beauty of Iyer's prose. His descriptions and observations of Santa Barbara and L.A. are original and precisely correct. The romance with Camilla is a real-life acting out of the abandonment of the Sufis. Camilla is whiny and insecure -- she is also mysterious and loving and beautiful. This will not be everyone's favorite book, but if you love poetry, and mystery (in the sense of awe and wonderment), and spirituality, and supremely good writing, you will love "Abandon."

Rating:
Summary: log rolling in our time
Review: Once upon a time there was a successful essayist who wrote lots and lots of book reviews for Time and The New York Review of Books, and assorted other periodicals, and then his reviews were quoted on hundreds of dust jackets, and eventually he was so successful people would send him their books hoping he would say something nice about them...

In England there is a popular phenomenon called "log rolling", (coincidentally the author of Abandon was born in England) where if one critic writes an astonishingly kind review, and lo and behold the very guy he wrote about writes something preposterously flattering in a review of the critic's next book, people notice and say something about it.
Something insulting.

I consider Mr. Iyer to be the world champion log roller. Read the bigger city papers and news outlets, and you feel that the authors are straining to say something generous, but I suggest you compare them to smaller papers where this book is consistently slammed as unreadable or worse. Most large papers get authors of books, or people who think they will be, to write their reviews; authors who might want to work for AOL Time Warner or Conde Nast or Random House some day, or at least be treated well by them...
I do not believe that if this book were submitted by an unknown writer that it would have received so much as a form letter in acknowledgement by any publisher who did not require financial compensation. Unfortunately for the readers, and to some degree the publisher, they probably paid a sizeable advance for this misuse of tree pulp and will do what they can to minimize their loss.

I shall regard reviews with greater and greater suspicion, especially those where the publisher is under a huge corporate umbrealla with media outlets, and I will not be making any more book buying decisions on the strength of a certain nationally syndicated pundit.

No one lives happily ever after.
Oops, I've given away the ending.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant!
Review: Please don't waste your time on the mean spirited and the witless reviews below. Buy this book, imbibe this book, and make your own decision. But this reviewer, anyway, found Abandon to be exquisitely conceived and crafted, indeed an altogether lovely, work of literary Art. Iyer's vision and prose grows ever more subtle and refined, article by article, book by book.

Rating:
Summary: SAVE YOUR DOUGH!
Review: This book is a big waste of time and money.
The author should never write fiction, or anything that requires an imagingation.
I understand that he went to lots of famous schools and has been everywhere in the world (except the places in this book, apparently). What an embarassment for the schools.
Didn't his education help him realize that this book was excruciating, and needed to be edited by someone who actually cared how painful this would be to read?

Rating:
Summary: Ruminating on Rumi
Review: This is a much too long piece of fiction hiding behind the subtitle of a romance. At times i felt that Rumi had met the characters in some New Age novel. It was a disappointment.

Do not be deterred,Rumi's poetry is wonderful to read and re-read. Get copies of Rumi translated by Coleman Barks. Do not bother with this book.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: This novel is truly disappointing. I've been an admirer or Pico Iyer's non-fiction work for a long time but I couldn't find anything to like in this book. It's repetitive and boring--you keep hoping something will happen to redeem the narrative but it never does.