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| 3rd Quarter, 2003 |  |
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Abandon by Pico Iyer
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| Of Love & Poetry | |||||||||||||
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PUBLISHED: Volume 11 Issue 3, Third Quarter 2003
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 Abandon, A Romance could well be one of Pico Iyer’s travelogues, with a Sufi theme, so vivid and immediate are his descriptions of Damascus, New Delhi, the Taj Mahal in Agra. But, as the title states, in case you miss the fact that the travel chronicler is venturing into new territory, this is ‘A Romance’. And, funnily enough, the budding friendship between John Macmillan, a student of Sufi poetry in California, and Camilla Jensen, a lady as mysterious as the poet that Macmillan is endeavouring to understand, is as vivid and real as his descriptions of exotic locales. While the two do not exactly blend as intricately as a Persian rug design, the reader is content that one leads into the other, rather than forming a backdrop. The ‘Romance’ happens primarily in California. Macmillan’s search for exotic and missing manuscripts of Sufi poetry, which came out of Iran, leads him around the world and the reader does find himself wondering where the twain will meet.
Interspersed with longish discourses on Sufi thought, (the Sufis were a small group of Moslems whose aim, quite simply, was to find a direct path to the divine, without the mediation of any Imam or cleric) various interpretations of the poems of Rumi and of the word ‘abandon’ – as in abandonment, abandon (desert), abandon (innumerable) – the book may not make for easy reading, but then no one promised the reader a rose garden. Only a tightly constructed Mughal layout of well-planned thoughts and interpretations linked with a story line. |
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