The Shadow of the Wind [Hardcover]

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon is literary fiction in the truest sense. It is a novel about books - about one book in particular - and about the power of words to inspire, inflame and ultimately destroy.
10-year-old Daniel Sempere discovers `The Shadow of the Wind' in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books and from that moment his life becomes entwined with and begins to follow a similar path to that of the book's author Julian Carax.
The drama is played out amid the horrors and uncertainties of Revolutionary and Post-revolutionary Barcelona, where class is everything and yet where power rests not only with rich families but with anyone sufficiently ambitious and unscrupulous to take full advantage of the vacuums that war has left. Daniel, the novel's narrator, is none of these things. He is just a normal boy caught up in events beyond his understanding and control, and which threaten to overwhelm him.
Amid the realities of time and place, however, Zafon's sense of humour shines through. He is able to see comedy in the grimmest settings and situations. Indeed, there are passages where the line between grim drama, comedy and even farce is finely drawn, as in many scenes featuring the novel's most endearing character, Fermin Romero de Torres, spy turned tramp turned bookshop guru. It is Fermin who shines a light on life's tragedy and shows us the real meaning of loyalty and friendship.
The Shadow of the Wind has its malevolent villain too, one who evokes shades of Hugo's Javert, though without Javert's morality or redeemability. Fumero is corruption and decadence personified, almost to the point of melodrama.
The novel is literary, for sure, but it is also an historical romance with gothic overtones. Julian Carax haunts its pages with an almost but not quite supernatural presence. Yet amid all the horrors and amorality of this war-torn society resides love that defies class and convention.
Daniel, vaguely reminiscent of John Ridd in Lorna Doone, is a self-deprecating hero. He confesses to being a coward yet he seems not enough of a fool to risk his life when the odds are so stacked against him. When it really matters - to the story - he comes through to his own cost.
Translations are tricky. The translator must not only translate the words but must also capture the mood, the emotion, the sense of time and place and the nuances of language of the original, and present them convincingly as the author's own. He or she must remove that `alien' feel and render the work as acceptable to the reader as a work in his or her own language.
In this translation, Lucia Graves manages to do just that. By the end, I felt I knew the Barcelona of the nineteen-thirties, -forties and -fifties; in her prose, I could feel the texture of the snow; I could be disgusted by the fetidness of the abandoned garrets or be awed at the ostentatious luxury of the upper-class villas; I could hear the clanking of trams as they made their way along the Avenido del Tibidabo or the peal of church bells across the city.
The Shadow of the Wind has all the elements of an enduring classic. It is a story that sometimes shocks but often makes you laugh. And just once or twice, it makes you shed a tear or two.

'Few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later - no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn to forget - we will return.'

The story begins in the early summer of 1945 in Barcelona, in the wake of the Spanish Civil War, when ten-year-old Daniel Sempere is taken to the ancient, cavernous Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time by his antiquarian bookseller father. From the hundreds of thousands of books contained within the endless corridors of the labyrinthine bibliographic mausoleum, Daniel must choose one book to adopt; he will, he is told, be that book's guardian for the rest of his life. He chooses The Shadow of the Wind by an obscure Spanish novelist called Julián Carax - a choice that will change his life forever.

Captivated by the book, Daniel becomes intrigued by its enigmatic author. Over the years that follow, as he grows from a young boy into an awkward adolescent, he uncovers various clues about Carax and attempts to build a picture of the man. He is told that Carax was killed in Barcelona at the beginning of the civil war and discovers that his is the only surviving copy of The Shadow of the Wind; a sinister, faceless character who smells of burned paper and calls himself Laín Coubert, the name of a character created by Carax, has been going around burning every book by Carax that he can find and Daniel's copy survived only because it had been kept safe in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.

With the help of his frequently entertaining sidekick Fermín Romero de Torres (a man with secrets of his own), Daniel begins to piece together the truth about the tragic events of Julián Carax's life, events which appear unnervingly similar to those taking place in his own life. In the process, he stirs up emotions amongst those who once knew Carax and attracts the decidedly dangerous attention of the vengeful and sadistic police inspector (and ex-Francoist torturer and assassin) Francisco Javier Fumero, whose quest for vengeance threatens the lives of Daniel and those close to him.

It's difficult to go into any further detail without giving too much away, so I won't. What I will say is that this is a fabulous, captivating book; a book about books, which is the very best kind of book for a bibliophile like me. There are plot twists and turns aplenty; there are characters to love and hate, and there is tragedy, romance and humour (especially when Fermín Romero de Torres is about). Once I began reading, I really didn't want to stop. This truly is an outstanding book.

I am aware that I am in the minority with what I am about to say here, this book has sold over seven million copies worldwide and is the second best selling book in Spanish history, so I could well be wrong, but I really struggled with this. I nearly gave up on it on several occasions, which I never do.

The story, and I can only give a really topline summary here, because it is so complicated, begins as Daniel is taken by his father to a hidden library called 'The Cemetery of Forgotten Books' and asked to choose a book to look after. The Cemetery is run by collectors of rare books and is used as a place to store forgotten books so they will remain in existence. Daniel chooses 'The Shadow of the Wind' by Julian Carax and falls in love with the book.

When he begins to be followed by a disfigured man and other people begin to offer him exorbitant prices for 'The Shadow of the Wind' he realises he hasn't simply picked a book, but become involved in a mystery.

So far so good, an interesting premise and what seems like it could be an exciting read in the vein of Da Vinci Code. It is based on a reliable formula, there is plenty of intrigue and the plot line twists and turns impressively enough. It is however the storyline that makes this a failure for me. There is no doubt that it is an intricate and well-planned plot, but what makes something like Da Vinci Code so emminently readable is the effortless way in which the story is played out. Dan Brown has many failures as an author, but telling a good story is not one of them. Zafon's story unfolds with none of the ease of Brown's books, on the contrary, The Shadow of the Wind is weighed down by it's story.

Characters are introduced only as a way of moving the story on, if Daniel needs to find something out he simply meets someone and they launch into an essay of exposition; often in such detail that I flipped between being overwhelmed, bored and feeling like I was being cheated.

Where it is worst, it is terrible and inept.

While the majority of the text is written from the position of Daniel, the novel suffers from horrible point of view problems. One character, a priest who went to school with Carax, suddenly lapses into third person omniscient for a twenty page information dump of purple prose. Worse still, the vast majority of this information is about things that the priest simply could not of known and at the end you realise that the only point of the whole section was to reveal a plot twist which could have easily been delivered in one sentence.

Worst still, as a reader I felt no empathy for Daniel and for the most part he was only there as a device to move the plot forward, I couldn't have cared less when he was in danger and considered him purely as a conduit for information about Carax.

The main villain of the piece Fumero is little more than a pantomine bad guy, laughing behind his cape and when he begins swearing it seems so incongruous with the rest of the book that it renders him little more than a caricature.

Additionally, the novel dips hugely in the centre- I think a good editor could trim 100 pages from it and make a much faster paced, smoother read and probably tidy up the transitions between past and present. I don't know whether this is the fault of the translation, but there is at least one place the narrative switches from the first person "I" to the second person "you", an error which I found particularly disconcerting.

I was really disapointed that I didn't enjoy The Shadow of the Wind, I didn't expect it to be a masterpiece of literature, but at the very least I wanted a gripping storyline and an enjoyable holiday read. What I got was a flabby overlong storyline pretending to be a novel.