The Shadow Of The Wind

I must admit I’m quite a reader (guilty as charged) but I somehow missed the good old story-telling. Literature nowadays usually aims at being different, avant garde is sometimes an end in itself and most of the time it’s all about the form of what’s been said rather than the content itself. While I can understand that, I can’t say I’m too fond of it. Having read a vast number of damn good books earlier in my life, I couldn’t help asking myself: “Where did they all go?”

That was, I mean, until I found “The Shadow Of The Wind” – a novel by the Spanish writer Carlos Ruiz Zafon. I pretty much lived certain parts of the plot myself and here’s the story…

I was going back from the university one day and I saw that book displayed in a bookshop window glass. I had no idea who Zafon was or what the book was about but there was a picture of a lantern on its front cover and I was immediately attracted to it. So I bought it with no hesitation and I started reading it right away. When I turned back the last page, it was almost morning outside and I knew that book has changed my view towards literature for I had never read anything like it before. And what’s more – I rejoiced, because good old narrative was back.

“The Shadow Of The Wind” is a book about the books – about the passion for reading, the passion for discovering life itself. It is set in post-civil war Barcelona. One morning, little Daniel Sempere wakes up only to find out that he can no longer remember his late mother’s face. In order to calm him down and to distract him, his father takes him to a place, known by very few people – it’s called The cemetery of forgotten books and on its shelves there’re copies of every book that has ever been published, houses books forgotten by everybody. There’s one rule: whoever enters this place for the first time, can take a book with him and adopt it.

So Daniel picks a small book by an unknown author, called Julian Carax. The book is called “The Shadow Of The Wind”. The boy reads it overnight and is so fascinated by the story, that he tries to find more books by the same author. Unfortunately, no one seems to be able to help him – the story goes that there’s a leather-masked stranger who buys all copies and burns them. Daniel himself gets the chance to meet him a couple of times because he holds one of the last copies left and when he does meet him, terrified, he recognizes in him Lain Coubert, the devil in Julian’s book.

What’s more, Julian’s name is wreathed in mystery and there are very few people that might help Daniel find out what really happened to his hero – people who knew Carax personally, who were part of his life and with whom Daniel meets over the years. Gradually, he unravels Julian’s tragedy and solves the mystery that keeps taking lives.

I won’t tell you anymore of the plot because the story is so tangled and so beautifully told that I don’t want to ruin it for you. It runs through many years and can actually be seen as a coming-of-age story. It’s all in there: love, friendship, trust, brutal murders, mystery, sudden twists in the plot and the story’s so wonderfully told that you don’t want it to end. Zafon is a real magician when it comes to words – as if there’s only one word perfect for each place in the pages and he keeps finding it over and over again. By the time the book does end, you get the feeling that you know all these people (the characters in Zafon’s books are as many as in a phone book but they all are as alive as you and me are right now), that you were blessed with a chance to become a part of their lives for a little while and to share their fears, hopes and quests, to see the light from Lain Coubert’s cigarette and to enter The Cemetery of forgotten books, to take a walk round the streets of Barcelona and feel the cool air late at night.

So just like Daniel found Carax’s book by chance, I found Zafon’s one. As I already told you, I picked it up because of the lantern on it’s cover – and that was the best choice I had made in years. Ever since I read it, I couldn’t find a book that even comes close to it. Oh, wait. Last summer I found one – Zafon’s second novel, “The Angel’s Game”.