The Shadow of the Wind

I'm not a big fan of event books, the ones that you find amidst the best-sellers and the beach reading, the ones that are on everyone's recommended reading list. They bore me. A plucky protagonist, in these days usually an anachronistic nod to modern tastes and sensibilities if its a period piece, a meandering plot with a load of self-referential psycho-babble, or more than likely just a transposed True Crime novel aping a Silence of the Lambs, pandering to the least common denominator.

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon is oddly none of these and all of these. Let me explain. The book is set in post-war Barcelona but not any Barcelona that I recognised. It's as if the quirkiness of the city, the colorful and inviting qualities of Dali and Gaudi, the Sagrada Familia and Park Guell, was gray-washed out, darkened and in its place the city was blanketed by a layer of soot or decay equal to any inflicted on the literary London by Charles Dickens.

This is a foreboding place, a place of violence and Gothic tragedy, and our guide into this labyrinthine world is a 10 year old boy named Daniel Sempere. He's a bookseller's son, inquisitive and intelligent, but fiercely loyal to his father (who is a widower) and the people of his neighborhood who guide and protect him. In the beginning, his father takes him to a cemetery, but he quickly finds out that this cemetery houses books, thousands of lost and endangered books, and not people. I'm not giving anything away to say that Daniel is given a book in this Cemetery of Lost Books that will change his life. It is called the Shadow of the Wind by the fictional author Julian Carax.

My impressions of it? The Shadow of the Wind is a very modern novel, with all of the tricks of meta-fiction, very self-referential, but not so terribly manipulative as I've read in the past. It is a piece of fiction that explores itself: a book about books and about reading and writers. It references Gothic romances, pulp-fiction, early weird tales, and especially post-war roman noir. It is also highly influenced by different media, especially the modern Spanish cinema of Alejandro Almenabar (The Others), Pedro Almodovar (Bad Education), Juan Antonio Bayona (The Orphanage) and Guillermo del Toro (The Devil's Backbone). It is atmospheric, bordering many genres, and smartly written. It doesn't talk down to you, but it allows itself to breathe and relish in the absurdity of its own plot. You can tell that the author is enjoying himself, revelling in the act of storytelling.

He has big plans for the series. 5 books that share many of the same characters, a timeline spanning generations, covering the grand story of Spain in the last century, interweaving the individual stories, books separate from each other, but intertwining their narratives and their characters, shining new lights on the previous and subsequent books, for a very modern take on an old storytelling tradition.

With that you might also think the novel no more than a construct of plot and events, made by machines for machines and yes we have all read these sorts of books before: twist endings tacked on after the fact, red herrings and manipulative narrators nudging you along at a breakneck pace so you don't see the flaws in the plot sure, but so that you also ignore the holes in characterisation and that ultimately have nothing to say to you as human beings. This is a smart book sure, but it is also a wise book. It teaches about the power of love, and duty, and family, and like all great books it leaves it mark: it is quotable. Here are a few.

• Presents are made for the pleasure of who gives them, not for the merits of who receives them.
• We exist as long as somebody remembers us.
• Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.
• Few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart

A wonderful novel. I can hardly wait for his next one.