The Shadow Of The Wind

The Shadow Of The Wind

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The Shadow of the Windis a literary thriller set in Barcelona in the first half of the 20th century, from the fading splendour of Modernism to the shadowy post-war world. The Shadow of the Wind has elements of mystery, historical, and comedy of manner genres but it is most of all a tragic love story which echoes through time. With great narrative power, the author reveals plots and intrigues as though opening up a Russian doll in an unforgettable tale about the secrets of the heart and the magic of books, maintaining the mystery until the last page.

All of this is held together by a tightly-plotted narrative, exciting and fast-paced, yet one that pauses to pay homage to the tradition of books, to the power of words, to quiet contemplation about life, love, memories, hate, and revenge, of dreams that lived in the shadows of the wind. It is about the impact of stories, of first words and moments that have found their way into our hearts, of the lives of strangers and the lingering traces of everything that has gone on before us, that has unknowingly shaped our destinies and will soon irrevocably change us and transform our futures.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind is an ambitious literary thriller; perhaps too ambitious. Much of it reads like a standard Victorian potboiler, but it's set mainly in Franco Spain (allowing for political under- and over-tones), and there's a strong literary (and bibliophile) cast to it too. The narrator, Daniel, is the son of a Barcelona bookseller, and the novel opens with a marvelous invention: the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. It is this world that Daniel is initiated into in 1945, when he is just ten years old:In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader's hands. It's a fantastic place, and Ruiz Zafon adds the appropriate twist to get things rolling, as Daniel's father explains to his son:\"According to tradition, the first time someone visits this place, he must choose a book, whichever he wants, and adopt it, making sure that it will never disappear, that it will always stay alive.\" Daniel makes his fatal choice, a book called The Shadow of the Wind by a Julián Carax. As it turns out (and how could it be otherwise ), this is a very special and extremely rare book. As soon as it becomes known that Daniel has a copy he gets several very generous offers for it -- but he knows his duty to the book. But, as someone has been going around for years collecting and destroying all copies of all of Carax's works, being guardian of the book isn't entirely without danger. Daniel slowly learns the story of the author, who wrote and published several other works in the 1920s and 30s that were published in Paris and then in Barcelona. He: \"lead a ghostly existence between his job as a pianist in a variety club and his disastrous career as a remarkably unsuccessful novelist.\" Most traces of his life seem to have disappeared, but over the course of the novel Daniel manages to uncover quite a bit, learning bits and pieces from some of those who knew him. But for decades the shadowy figure calling himself Laín Coubert -- a figure in Carax's The Shadow of the Wind (the devil, in fact) -- has been trying his damnedest to eradicate the remaining traces, and especially the books that were left behind. And Coubert isn't the only sinister figure: there's also -- or is it the same person -- the novel's arch-villain, an opportunistic sadist who by the early 1950s had risen to chief inspector of the Barcelona Crime Squad, Francisco Javier Fumero, who seems unnaturally obsessed by Carax. Daniel only slowly comes to learn the whole story -- and only eventually becomes drawn into it completely. Along the way, among other things, he falls in love with a blind woman, Clara (who had also once been captivated by Carax's writing) and rescues another victim of Fumero's, Fermín Romero de Torres, who comes to work in the family bookshop -- and helps Daniel in his quests. Daniel does get drawn into the Carax-story, which is more mysterious and complex than he could have imagined. The pieces fall into place -- childhood friendships and humiliations, disappointed and discouraged love, deepest-rooted and long-lingering hatred and anger --, and conflict and confrontation are unavoidable. Several of the characters are unwilling to leave the past dead and buried (literally, in some cases), and Daniel finds himself in the middle of it all. It's a book full of passion and revenge, unrequited love, grave disappointments, and a bit of redemption. Daniel isn't particularly heroic, but he's a sympathetic central figure, not too ambitious and very human in his failings. Fermín is a great and resourceful sidekick, and many of the other characters are well-drawn too. Others are stock characters straight out of Victorian schlock, the purely evil Fumero especially. Straight out of Victorian novels, too, are some of the twists, from most of the love affairs to Laín Coubert's story and quest. Much of this is still good fun (and there's certainly enough suspense), but some of it is also simply a bit much. The heated writing works well in part. There are moments when it achieves its desired effect, as when one arrives at a scene finding:The white marble was scored with black tears of dampness that looked like blood dripping out of the clefts left by the engraver's chisel. But elsewhere he can't sustain it, the writing smoky (or foggy -- as everything seems always shrouded in fog) rather than smouldering, the complexity of the story hampering the presentation. Ruiz Zafon even has to resort to a long section that is the a manuscript left behind by one of the characters, one of several awkward shifts in his presentation of the complicated Carax-backstory. Ruiz Zafon sets his sights high, but can't always measure up, and the failures are then all the more pronounced. The clearest example is that of the wonderful Cemetery of Forgotten Books, which he doesn't use nearly well enough (or even nearly enough). Only once more is a character initiated, brought to this fantastic repository to select a book: \"no longer remembered by anyone\". What is the chosen volume A copy of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles. (If this were meant as satire one might understand the choice, but Ruiz Zafon is almost relentlessly serious throughout the book.) The complex story twists and turns all about -- and shifts frequently from present to filling in the blanks from the past --, and the focus is not always precise enough. Matters do come to a head, and all is satisfyingly (melo-)dramatically resolved, and even if the reader has been tossed about a bit more than necessary, it's by and large a gripping and entertaining read. Ruiz Zafon doesn't juggle his many ideas quite as well as one might wish, but he shows some admirable restraint with some of the central characters -- not making Daniel a writer, for example, but rather leaving him willing to accept his lesser place in life -- and that compensates for the over-the-top characters (Fumero !). Uneven, but a fairly engrossing read.

The international literary sensation, about a boy's quest through the secrets and shadows of postwar Barcelona for a mysterious author whose book has proved as dangerous to own as it is impossible to forget.

Barcelona, 1945 - just after the war, a great world city lies in shadow, nursing its wounds, and a boy named Daniel awakes on his eleventh birthday to find that he can no longer remember his mother’s face. To console his only child, Daniel’s widowed father, an antiquarian book dealer, initiates him into the secret of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a library tended by Barcelona’s guild of rare-book dealers as a repository for books forgotten by the world, waiting for someone who will care about them again. Daniel’s father coaxes him to choose a volume from the spiraling labyrinth of shelves, one that, it is said, will have a special meaning for him. And Daniel so loves the novel he selects, The Shadow of the Wind by one Julian Carax, that he sets out to find the rest of Carax’s work. To his shock, he discovers that someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book this author has written. In fact, he may have the last one in existence. Before Daniel knows it his seemingly innocent quest has opened a door into one of Barcelona’s darkest secrets, an epic story of murder, magic, madness and doomed love. And before long he realizes that if he doesn’t find out the truth about Julian Carax, he and those closest to him will suffer horribly.As with all astounding novels, The Shadow of the Wind sends the mind groping for comparisons—The Crimson Petal and the White The novels of Arturo Pérez-Reverte Of Victor Hugo Love in the Time of Cholera—but in the end, as with all astounding novels, no comparison can suffice. As one leading Spanish reviewer wrote, \"The originality of Ruiz Zafón’s voice is bombproof and displays a diabolical talent. The Shadow of the Wind announces a phenomenon in Spanish literature.\" An uncannily absorbing historical mystery, a heart-piercing romance, and a moving homage to the mystical power of books, The Shadow of the Wind is a triumph of the storyteller’s art.

Shadow of the Wind is a complex and sometimes long winded novel (480 pages) that has drawn comparisons to books such as The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum. It combines elements of romance, mystery and crime into one big paella of a book, while also exploring many aspects of love - the love of a good book, the love of parents for their children, of unrequited, unspoken and rejected love and of love lost...continued

Meanwhile, the shadow of the dictatorship falls on the lives of Daniel and his father. The man they hire to help in the bookshop, Fermín, was a political prisoner, held in Montjuic Castle, where he was tortured by Inspector Fumero. Fumero is a nasty, vengeful man, who is out to get Fermín by any means. 59ce067264

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