I have taken far too long a time to finish The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón.Let's put all my cards on the table: I don't really read genre fiction or mysteries. TSoTW is like a fantasy mystery. So, yes, it took a while before I actually started reading it. Too bad for me. From the first line ("I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time" -p.5) to the last (Soon afterward, like figures made of steam, father and son disappear into the crowd of the Ramblas, their steps lost forever in the shadow of the wind - p.487), the novel basically drags you into "bewitched" Barcelona, and holds you captive, unable to look away from the grotesque story unfolding before you.
The story revolves around Daniel Sempere, a young boy who discovers that book at the tender age of ten. You know, that book: the one that makes you see the world in a whole new way, the one that you’ll hold every other books up to as a standard, the one that stays with you long after you’ve put it down. For Daniel, that book is The Shadow of the Wind by Julián Carax. In his quest to find every book that Carax has ever written, he stumbles upon a decades-old plot, sinister enough to involve the devil himself, which would see every last copy of Carax’s work incinerated. He is quickly pulled into a drama full of twists and turns, of clandestine meetings and dripping dark rooms, of love and betrayal and hatred.
Zafón’s writing simply oozes with heartbreak and longing. Reading it was like watching an intense Pasodoble full of passion and drama. This is the kind of book I wished I had saved for riding a train through the midnight countryside of Spain; helpfully, it includes a walking tour of all the places in the book, so when I do visit Barcelona, I feel, somehow, prepared for its tragically romantic façade.
Clocking in at just under five hundred pages, filled with dense writing, this is not a novel for the casual reader. It is, however, a novel that satisfies every appetite when finished. A high recommendation.
2 comments:
At the time of the book meeting I hadn't finished it yet, I was about half-way through and that was b/c I pushed myself to keep at it. Anyways, at the meeting Laura was very secretive about the rest of the book (she was the only one that had read it!) and that just made me want to finish it even more LOL not so much the story, just b/c she'd made such a mystery about it! So, I finished it! I had guessed the identity of the faceless man and Carax's true parentage. If V.C. Andrews has taught me anything is that if you get locked up for getting impregnated, it's almost always b/c of incest!
You say fantasy mystery, I didn't really take it for fantasy - when I think fantasy, I think magic, witches, hobbits, unicorns.
Anyways, I still don't really know how I feel about it ... I didn't hate it, but I didn't really love it either.
I had totally guessed the faceless man's identity as well (and I really like the parallels between him and Fumero). I did NOT guess Carax's parentage at all and I found that incredibly sad. i guess it wasn't as much "fantasy" as it was "gothic"; in many ways, Zafon made Barcelona itself the most fleshed-out character... and something about a living, breathing, sinister city made it all seem fantastical to me. I don't think it's for everyone, as I said, but I enjoyed it. thoroughly.
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