By Carlos Ruiz Zafón
This spellbinding and intensely atmospheric novel is essential reading for anyone living in Spain. Set in Barcelona, birthplace of the author, it describes how, in the early summer of 1945, a boy called Daniel is taken by his father to a strange building, a ‘place of echoes and shadows’, in the heart of the old city. This is the ‘Cemetery of Forgotten Books’ where, in a bewildering maze of corridors, countless forgotten and obscure titles are housed.
Daniel’s father explains that the library is a sanctuary for every volume shelved there and that it is the tradition, the first time someone visits it, to choose and adopt a book. Thereafter, that book must be cherished by its new owner and never allowed to disappear. After long deliberation, Daniel selects a novel entitled The Shadow of the Wind . Its author is Julián Carax. The young boy senses that the novel had been waiting there for him, in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, all his life - probably since before he was born. His subsequent obsession with the book and its author alters the course of his life.
The Shadow of the Wind begins in Franco’s Spain, just six years after the Civil War. Barcelona, deeply divided by the terrible cruelties of that war, has not recovered from its wounds. An uneasy atmosphere of fear and suspicion remains. In the story, several narratives unfold, all inextricably linked with the lives of Daniel and the enigmatic Julián Carax. Both Julián and Daniel experience passionate love affairs.
In the novel that Daniel took from the Cemetery of Forgotton Books, the Devil is represented by an evil character called Laín Coubert. Daniel later realises that the mysterious person who follows him and manifests himself as a faceless, limping man, leaving in his wake the smell of burning paper in his mission to seek out and burn every book that Carax has ever published, is Coubert himself. He knows that Daniel has a copy of The Shadow of the Wind, Julián’s last novel. However, this harrowing spectre cannot compete, when it comes to evil, with the brutal Inspector Fumero. He is searching for an unnamed, elusive person, connected in some way with Daniel and his friend, Fermín.Towards the end of the novel, he at last finds that person, and the story reaches a bloody climax.
As well as mystery, violence, passion and tragedy, there is also great humour in the book. This is largely represented by the character of Fermín Romero de Torres ( a name he adopted after seeing a poster advertising a famous bullfighter). He is begging on the streets when Daniel first encounters him, and becomes a loyal, lifelong friend, ready to give his life if necessary. Fermín is exuberant, outspoken and incurably roguish. His language is colourful and unrestrained, and there is an amusing scene in which he offends three prim ladies during a bus ride. Even when he is brought home, half dead, after a violent encounter with the brutal Inspector Fumero, his humour remains irrepressible.
The beautiful Clara, Penélope and Bea, three of the main female characters in the book are, in the eyes of their youthful adorers, wholly unobtainable. Closely guarded by jealous fathers, they neverthless contrive to relinquish their virtue and do so with an ease which you wouldn’t expect from well-brought-up young Spanish ladies of that era.
Shadow of the Wind is translated from the Spanish by Lucia Graves, daughter of Robert Graves.
