I had resisted reading The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon for quite a while, even though the synopsis intrigued me, because a certain bookstore where I used to work promoted it shamelessly, touting it as the read of the season. Now that I have had a little bit of psychological distance, I decided to try it out.
On the day of his tenth birthday, Daniel, the son of a secondhand bookstore owner, is taken to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, where he selects as his own mission and project a book called The Shadow of the Windby Julian Carax. As it turns out, this book is perhaps the last remaining copy, surrounded by the legend of a figure who buys Carax books to burn them. Set in Barcelona in the 1950s, the story has two tiers: that of Daniel as he searches for the history of his prize, and that of Julian twenty years earlier, writing books that no one reads and disappearing into the city. While the story suffers from unrelieved melodrama, it is certainly well-paced, providing clues one step ahead of Daniel’s deduction. Naturally Daniel’s connection to Julian turns out to be closer than he expects.
A blurb on the back equated Zafon’s book with a mix of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Umberto Eco, and Jorge Luis Borges – a combination irresistible to me. However, the reviewer ought to have said that Zafon is more like Matthew Pearl (The Dante Club) or Arturo Perez-Reverte (The Club Dumas) or Ross King (Ex-Libris). I enjoy all six – all seven – of the authors, but Zafon is no Eco. When it debuts in paperback, I will more than likely seek out his second translated novel, The Angel’s Game, but for now let us call things what they are: very good, but not quite, not yet, great.
7.0 / 10.0.
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