By Carlos Ruiz Zafón
In the days of my adolescence, when I knew that one day I would be a famous writer…so I might as well get started now…I once envisioned a post-apocalyptic world in which forgotten libraries were one-by-one recovered. I don’t remember many details of the plot I developed for that story. Perhaps I even have a manuscript in a forgotten box or drawer, buried by decades of living. But I do remember a scene in which a strawberry harvest was packed into a huge wooden tank, pulled by draft horses over rocky, hot roads across a mountain range. When it arrived, the syrup was decanted and fermented to make strawberry wine.
For some reason, The Shadow of the Wind revives that feeling for me. I bought the book on a whim, began reading it reluctantly, but found myself intrigued both by the plot and the atmosphere the author created. Indeed, the first scene takes place in the mysterious mazes of a house of forbidden books, called The Cemetery of Forgotten Books. It takes no more than two sentences for the author to lure you into his spell, using magical language, the first of an abundance of metaphors that ripen into images you can’t help but remember: “…we walked through the streets of a Barcelona trapped beneath ashen skies as dawn poured over Rambla de Santa Mónica in a wreath of liquid copper.”
I rarely pay attention to a book’s rating according to the New York Times, and even less to the expansive praise of blurbs printed in the first few pages of a book. I usually assume that the publisher either needed to use up extra pages, or that they were finding it difficult to convince shoppers to fork out for the book. So I had no warning about how much a Gothic detective story this was bound to be. The secret sanctuary of banned books in an ancient, decaying mansion on a back street of post-war Barcelona was only the first of many impressive settings. As the protagonist seeks to solve the mystery of an author whose works were being relentlessly destroyed by a faceless villain using the devil’s pseudonym, he wanders through a city shaken by facism, civil war, mistrust, resentment and police brutality.
The city itself is only one of a number of striking characters. The bookseller Barceló spouts oratory that “could kill flies in midair.” His gorgeous niece, incredibly seductive and completely blind, casts an innocent spell over the adolescent Daniel. After a severe beating, Daniel lands in the streets beside a begger who offers him a bit of wine that “tasted of diesel oil laced with vinegar.”
Conversation in books translated from a foreign language often come off stilted and hard to believe in. But this book, translated by the daughter of the late Robert Graves, creates such a mythic aura that nothing sounds odd. Indeed, the conversations seem completely modern, witty, intelligent. After that swig of tractor fuel, Daniel and the beggar introduce themselves to each other:
“Fermín Romero de Torres, currently unemployed. Pleased to meet you.”
“Daniel Sempere, complete idiot. The pleasure is all mine.”
Daniel’s glib interlocutor goes on to become his indispensable mentor in the quest for Julián Carax, a Barcelona author whose works were being incinerated. Their relationship is full of intrigue, espionage, plots and affairs of the heart, peppered with Fermín’s salacious avuncular advice.
Offsetting the good guys, the inevitable sinister cop, cut from the classic cloth of bad men in films noirs. He is everywhere, he knows all, his is an unpredictable power that defeats the good. Inspector Fumero and his henchmen provide a feeling of constant danger. Their nefarious acts, blamed on others, punctuate the novel like coffin nails. You know his defeat will signal the end of the book, because you have encountered his archetype before. But how his defeat will be arranged keeps you reading.
Like every good mystery, you almost never know who you can believe. The good turn out to be bad, or at least disappointing. Friendship and companionship leads to terror and destruction. People change, people disappear, people die.
The Shadow of the Wind is a richly textured book, but there are times when the plot slows and you wonder if you should go on. You should. It took me several days to read this one, not because it was hard to devour, but because I had to savor the words, the images, the travelogue it creates. I kept expecting a description of the tourist’s Barcelona, but these people lived as if…well, as if they lived there: none of them needed to snap photographs of a melting Gaudí cathedral. Their milieu was the back streets, the hidden squares, abandoned mansions and overgrown gardens that lay behind the walls the tourists pass by without noticing. Their minds are the mists, the shadows, the decrepit basements and the sunlight of a glorious and beaten city.
I guessed the ending, but not completely. Zafón had a surprise for me, too.
