The Shadow of the Wind

I read the opening few pages and instantly knew 3 things:
1. I was going to love this book.
2. I needed a whole pad of post-its to mark quotes.
3. I wanted to read this in Spanish for the rich poetry the language would add.

A young boy Daniel is taken by his father to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books and told to salvage a book which he must take stewardship over. He choses a novel—or maybe it chose him—that touches him, stirs his desire for literature, and forever entangles him with the fate of the book and its author. The strange author died in poverty but now someone is seeking out all remaining copies of his unsuccessful novels to burn. Daniel embarks on a mission to solve the mystery of the author's story being watched by a revengeful cop and the book burner himself. As the story twists and slowly unravels he doesn't know whose account to trust or how it will affect his life.

Wrapped up in the mystery is a message of death: do we live a full life or wander through it numb? The Shadow of the Wind is an allegory for death in a fictitious novel by the same title. Shadow is a perfect symbol for death evoking images of how death can be metaphorical instead of literal—living shadows of lives, chasing shadows of dreams, being shadows of others, letting memories shadow life. Every character had shadows which could engulf them or they could overcome. In this sense death becomes a fate we chose ourselves. For death is not always the worst thing that can happen ("words are not always the worst prison"). Every time the word shadow was used I considered its illusion of death. It was with much thought that the word was scattered throughout the book.

Spoilers
Just as the fictitious novel was an echo of the book and Julian's life, I loved watching Daniel's life parallel Julian's. Both grew up poor without an ideal family life, fell in love with a rich girl who was the adoration of her father and whose brother was a best friend, evoked murderous anger from her father after impregnating her, and when they have a brush with death, extremes of hate and love anchored their fight to survive. As Julian's story unfolds, Daniel unwittingly finds himself in the exact same point of their duel destiny.

Once Daniel is aware of the correlation, the comparison stops. Is it because Daniel consciously chooses to chance his path or has fate dealt him a better hand? Julian wrote "There are no coincidences. We are the puppets of our subconscious desires." But while the message is clear that we chose our own fate, it seems there was no fate but failure for Julian. The sad thing is I believed Julian's love for Penelope as it grew in obsession more than Daniel's love for Beatriz which seemed a happy chance of lust.

Themes of devils and angels are prevalent as characters save and ruin each others' lives. Clara is a physical angel who is blind while Fumero an emotional devil blinded by hate. While women tended to be described as angel and men devil, most characters held both in different shades. Take Julian the angel child bringing life (love, novels) who turned into the devil Lain Coubert bringing death (destruction, fear). But the characters pick whether to accept the destiny allotted them. Fermin was living death in the shadows of the street who had to get over his demons to find life worth living. The shadows for Nuria, Julian, Fortuny, even Fumero didn't have to give them a reason to quit living. They chose shadows.

The book reminded me of The 13th Tale thematically, linguistically, and in delivery, although I loved this book so much more. The way the mystery unfolds finding tidbits from different perspectives enhanced the mystery and aided the depth of characterization. When I can see the vicious wife beater, deceived husband, and regretful father all in Antonio Fortuny I get a more well rounded sense of his motives. I enjoyed how the characters played different roles for each other.

I love Barcelona as the setting. If you've been to the artistically enchanting city, you know it's the perfect backdrop to this eloquently enchanting tale with a gothic feel. The Spanish have a way of making all things metaphorically beautiful. The vivid romantic passages had me smiling and at times laughing out loud. I highly enjoyed the writing and it wasn't until two-thirds of the way into the book that the story finally stole my complete attention. Julian was my initial guess and while the story kept me questioning, it was the best solution and I was happy with the conclusion.

But no novel is perfect; my issues are these:
1. The readymade quotes are extreme. Zafon salvages this by calling himself out on the commentary. He sets the comments up in dialogue and then uses another character to mock the snippets.

2. Perspective, particularly in Nuria's letter, is off. How could she know what Miquel looked at when dying? The chapters of her letters change from direct commentary to Daniel to third-party narrative. Elsewhere in the novel Daniel summarizes conversations in italics but I wondered from whence the interruption of her narrative with Fumero's story came.

3. I always hope historical fiction will showcase a more accurate moral setting, but it rarely happens. While I believed the sex about Zafon's characters, done in secret and with fathers chasing down the culprits, how could they find out they were pregnant the next day? I was also disappointed that all marriages were displayed as wrong and wives disregarded. Oh well. I guess it added to the Spanish flavor of the book.

4. American authors tend to impose unrealistic happy endings while Europeans favor poignant sad ones. At one point it seemed bad things happened to Julian for nothing else than this love of tragedies. It seemed Zafon was going to ruin the characters lives to make a point. But he makes his point with Julian and leaves Daniel to gives us a satisfied ending. A story about the living dead cannot be all bliss but we still find redemption as the characters step out of the shadows and live their lives.

Quotes:
Few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart.
I believed, with the innocence of those who can still count their age on their fingers, that if I closed my eyes and spoke to her, she would be able to hear me wherever I was.
A secret's worth depends on the people form whom it must be kept.
Women have an infallible instinct for knowing when a man has fallen madly in love with them, especially when the male in question is both a complete dunce and a minor.
Death was like a nameless and incomprehensible hand...like a hellish lottery ticket. But I couldn't absorb the idea that death could actually walk by my side, with a human face and a heart that was poisoned with hatred.
The eternal stupidity of pursuing those who hurt us the most.
Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art.
Arrogant as only idiots can be.
I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory.
Presents are made for the pleasure of who gives them, not for the merits of who receives them.
Television...is the Antichrist...our world will not die as a result of the bomb...it will die of laughter, of banality, of making a joke of everything.
I realized how easily you can lose all animosity toward someone you've deemed your enemy as soon as that person stops behaving as such.
People talk too much. Humans aren't descended from monkeys. They come for parrots.
God, in His infinite wisdom, and perhaps overwhelmed by the avalanche of requests from so many tormented souls, did not answer.
Silencing their hearts and their souls to the point where...they forgot the words with which to express their real feelings.
People are evil. Not evil, moronic, which isn't quite the same thing. Evil presupposes a moral decision.
The words with which a child's heart is poisoned, through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later they burn his soul.
Marriage and family are only what we make of them.
Sometimes what matters isn't what one gives but what one gives up.
Destiny is usually just around the corner. But what destiny does not do home visits. You have to go for it.
Just an innocent boy who thought he had conquered the world in an hour but didn't yet realize that he could lose it again in an instant.
Keep your dreams. You never know when you might need them.
Fools talk, cowards are silent, wise men listen.
Waiting is the rust of the soul.
Sometimes we think people are like lottery tickets, that they're there to make our most absurd dreams come true.
While you're working you don't have to look life in the eye.
Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our livs fall apart so slowly we barely notice.
Time goes faster the more hollow it is.
I learned to confuse routine with normality.
The world war, which had polluted the entire globe with a stench of corpses that would never go away.
The clear, unequivocal lucidity of madmen who have escaped the hypocrisy of having to abide by a reality that makes no sense.
A story is a letter the author writes to himself to tell himself things he would be unable to discover otherwise.
The art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.
[speaking of television:] The novel is dead and buried...there'll be no more need for books, or churches, or anything.

From the day 10 year old Daniel is introduced to the Cemetery of Forgotten books by his father; and when invited to, chooses a book, The Shadow of the Wind by Julian Carax, a decade and more is spent on the mystery thus unearthed. Somebody is systematically destroying any book written by Carax! What? A book mystery that starts in a secret book cemetery!

This Gothic mystery set mostly in Barcelona in the 1950s but covers the post Spanish Civil War years too, should be a special and golden read, but there's something missing! Maybe there's too much use of exposition? The Spanish Civil War was given just a few odd paragraphs here and there, I wanted more. At times I flew through this book, on other occasions it was a struggle to pick up. 6 out of 12

"To truly hate is an art one learns with time."
Carlos Ruiz Zafón - The Shadow of the Wind (The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, #1)
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2020 read; 2005 read

Even better reading it the second time round. This book has definitely entered my list of one of my favourite books of all time!