Carlos Ruiz Zafon: The Shadow of the Wind

By STEPHANIE JOHNSON*

In 1945, when Daniel Sempere is 10, his second-hand bookseller father takes him to the massive and extraordinary Cemetery of Forgotten Books in Barcelona and allows him to make a selection. From the labyrinthine shelves and millions of volumes, he chooses The Shadow of the Wind by forgotten writer, Julian Carax. His father explains that whenever a book is consigned to oblivion, the people who know about the cemetery make sure the book is taken there to await the day it finds a new owner.

"Every book you see here has been somebody's best friend," he tells him.

Serious, motherless Daniel treasures the Carax novel above all other books. He learns that all other copies of it have been destroyed as well as the rest of Carax's small oeuvre, and that the one copy he found hidden in the cemetery is hot property. Other booksellers want it, as does one Inspector Fumero, a violent, powerful cop known for his sadism and cruelty. As Daniel grows up the events in the book mirror his own experiences — he falls in love with unavailable women, he alienates friends, he gets on the wrong side of Fumero. The mystery of Carax's fate and whereabouts begin to dominate his life.

The Shadow of the Wind is Zafon's fifth novel, a best-seller in Spain and Germany, before being published around the world. As well as being a thriller with as many twists and turns as the corridors and aisles of the fictitious cemetery, it fairly throbs with duende and erotica. It contains many asides and musings on the intimate, private nature of reading, and always with an over-riding sense of grief, as if we are witnessing, finally, after decades of predictions, the death of the novel. On a later visit to the cemetery Daniel finds a copy of Tess of the d'Ubervilles shelved near a copy of The Castilian Hog: In Search of the Roots of Iberian Pork. Are Hardy's books really consigned to an oblivion as deep as a bad cookbook? I don't think so.

Recently I reviewed Marius Brill's novel Making Love: A Conspiracy, which bears thematic similarities to this one. In both novels, books themselves attain a mystical, supernatural power. If the novel is to die, then perhaps the fetishisation of the form is the illness that will finish it off.

Other reviewers have compared The Shadow of the Wind to The Dumas Club and The Name of the Rose. It is certainly a wild and convoluted tale, enjoyable for its machismo, melodrama and unexpected flashes of dry humour.

* Stephanie Johnson's The Shag Incident won the Deutz medal for fiction at last year's Montana Awards