I’ve just finished reading The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón.
Like Marina, which I read several years ago, this conveyed a strong sense of time and place, but it’s a darker vision of Barcelona, a darker vision of humanity in general. It starts out like an ordinary coming-of-age story, and becomes gradually twistier and more mysterious, in some parts verging on horror—and about as gothic as it is possible to be without adding a real or suspected element of the supernatural.
It’s the story of young Daniel Sempere’s quest to learn more about the author of a book that utterly took hold of his imagination when he first read it at the age of fourteen. But Julián Carax disappeared many years ago, as have almost all copies of his books. To learn about him, Daniel seeks out other readers who have been equally beguiled by one of his books, and those who actually knew him. Each of these gives Daniel a fragment of the author’s life story, which becomes ever more dramatic and tragic the more that he learns. Complicating matters is the fact that some of them are reluctant to tell all that they know and (as he learns later) some have even lied to him about vital details. It’s a story within a story, a series of mysteries within a mystery. It also has a cast of quirky, elusive, seductive, and/or sinister characters, the most terrifying of these being the sadistic policeman Inspector Fumero, who has his own reasons for hiding the truth.
If you are a fan of Zafón’s writing, you are likely to adore this book, as it has all the extravagant passions, coincidences, revenges, and labyrinthine plotting one could possibly wish for.
