I first thought about posting this in the “what are you reading now” thread, but then I figured it deserved its’ own. It’s a book called “The shadow of the wind”, by a fairly new author called Carlos Ruiz Zafón. At first, the book grabbed me by the eyes and left my hands unable to stop flipping pages. Then, the main characters started to grow on me more and more while the book’s main mystery kept getting more intriguing. The last chapter had me literally sitting with either a look of shocked astonishment and a big smile on my face staring at quite a few passages.
So far it’s been pretty vague I know, but here’s the idea: There’s a place, located in a Barcelona still reeling after the civil war that is called the cemetery of forgotten books. Here thousands upon thousands of books are stored to prevent their disappearance from the world. The main character, a young boy who lives alone with his bookstore-owning father after his mother passed away, is taken one night to this cemetery where he is told that he can adopt a book and make it his own and care for it. The book he finds is called the shadow of the wind by a mysterious author known as Julian Carax. When he reads it, and wishes to find out everything about the author and his other tales, that’s when the real story begins.
I’ve always had a penchant for stories within stories influencing and growing on fictional readers’ lives, ever since I read “the neverending story” as a young’un. This story is arguably, right up my alley in terms of being able to intertwine different tales into one whole, with the fiction within the fiction becoming reality. But the thing that really got me was the beauty of the words with which Zafón realized for my mind’s eye the entire setting of Barcelona struggling with a dark past, as a sort of reflective setting for all characters within the book. Since the book itself mostly revolves around literature one book in particular at first, not only descriptions of Barcelona and its’ people are extensive and at times perhaps overdone, but also the way the main characters converse with each other is far from common day to day language. This, while it could be perceived as one of the author’s flaws, is for me one of the things that makes the book interesting and fun to read. Through the synaesthetic descriptions and long-windedness of some characters, I was reminded of Umberto Eco’s writing style at times. Zafón however does not intend to completely recreate certain ages of history the way Eco does. Instead he intertwines human tragedy on a microscale with that on the scale of wholesale war and complete societal anarchy in early twentieth century Barcelona.
While the last few years have seen a great proliferation of “literary” mysteries, and the title does somewhat reek of less than perfect poetical aspirations, I can not help but recommend the book. If any others have read this work of Zafón, or any others for that matter, feel free to comment. |
