“I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books…”

During the early hours of a morning in 1945, a ten year old boy, Daniel, is taken by his father to a secret place in the city of Barcelona: the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. There, he is allowed to choose one book, which he must adopt, ensuring that it stays alive. Wandering around the labyrinth of book shelves, he finally picks one out: ‘The Shadow of the Wind’ by Julián Carax. The consequences of this choice will reverberate down the years.

Taking the book home, the boy soon finds himself caught up in the story, and once he’s finished it, he sets out to find out all he can about the author. A family friend, finding Daniel in possession of the book, offers to buy it for a large sum of money. When Daniel refuses, he offers to help the boy in his quest, introducing him to his blind daughter, who has some familiarity with the author’s work. But the boy becomes entranced with the daughter, an infatuation that distracts him for years. Eventually, Daniel returns to his investigation of the mysterious author. He already knows that someone has been buying any remaining volumes of Carax’s work and burning them, a man with a burned face and the name of a character from one of Carax’s novels, a character who was really the devil. This man follows the boy, demanding that he hand over his copy of ‘The Shadow of the Wind.’ Knowing that this is the man who burns books, Daniel returns to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, where he hides the novel, in order to save it from the flames.

But this is not the end of Daniel’s quest. Befriending a beggar, Fermín, Daniel gives him a job in his father’s bookshop, and the beggar soon shows himself to be an amazingly resourceful man, someone with a mysterious past, who is haunted and terrorized by a sadistic detective, possibly acting on behalf of the fascist authorities. Fermín becomes Daniel’s confidante and together they go in search of the truth about the elusive Carax, a man who returned to Barcelona in the nineteen thirties after years of exile in Paris as a failed and penniless writer, and who died under mysterious circumstances. Having put his unrequited love for the blind girl behind him, Daniel finds a new love, but he soon realises that the path of his own life is a chilling reflection of the plot in Carax’s novel, ‘The Shadow of the Wind.’ Not only that, but Daniel bears a striking resemblance to Carax. As he and Fermín interview various people who knew Carax and those around him, it becomes clear that the author’s fate is rooted in his school days, and a group of friends he had. Those friends would have a fateful hand in Carax’s future: in introducing him to the love of his life, a relationship that caused him to flee from Barcelona, and also to the funding of his books, and even attempts on his life. But as Daniel’s investigations continue, his own safety and that of Fermín’s comes into question as they are shadowed by the police, and Fermín’s nemesis, the detective, whose interest in Daniel goes far beyond the man he’s employing. The man with the burned face and the devil’s name too is tracking them.

‘The Shadow of the Wind’ is a book about books and those who love them. In that respect it belongs to a select group of European novels that includes Arturo Pérez- Reverte’s ‘The Dumas Club’ and Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose.” These novels often refer to one another - Eco himself is the unnamed Professor of Semiotics from the University of Bologna who is listed as a member of ‘The Dumas Club’ in Pérez-Reverte’s novel, while ‘The Shadow of the Wind’ in turn refers to ‘The Dumas Club’ through a character named after the devil, protagonists who are basically book detectives, and a passing reference to Dumas. In fact, Dumas is named on the second page, and the novel has the kind of colourful characters, intrigue, romance, and humour to be found in Dumas’ work. Carax himself declares at an early age that he wants to be Robert Louis Stevenson, another writer of adventure novels as well as gothic horror. Carax writes dark gothic narratives that draw in the reader, but which inexplicably fail to sell any more than a handful of copies.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón lets his story play out during the first half of the twentieth century, from the early years of Carax’s life through the later Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship. Although politics are not the subject of the book, the dictatorship, the Civil War and the previous Republic are all central in the fates of characters, in their deaths or arrests, or their disappearances. The city of Barcelona too is central to the novel, and is beautifully described. But this is first and foremost an entertaining read, and Zafón never loses sight of the need to keep the reader enthralled and guessing. About two hundred and fifty pages into the book, he drops in what appears to be a ticking time bomb, which only serves to increase the tension. With fairly short chapters, gothic settings and creaky abandoned apartments and mansions, wonderful moments of humour and dialogue, and different accounts weaving through the text, Zafón keeps things moving like a master storyteller. But he’s also a very good writer. His Cemetery of Forgotten Books brings to mind other literary libraries such as that of Borges’ short story ‘The Library of Babel’ and Eco’s labyrinthine library in the isolated monastery in ‘The Name of the Rose.’

In fact, what Carlos Ruiz Zafón is giving the reader is an old fashioned good read, the kind of thing that nineteenth and early twentieth century readers got from Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle (Holmes is referred to in Zafón’s book, as he is in Eco’s novel in the character of William of Baskerville) and Alexandre Dumas. It’s a kind of novel that’s been eclipsed by more cynical genre plotting, tighter book categorisation, and literary navel-gazing. Zafón’s book encompasses ghost story, mystery, romance, adventure, and historical novel, in the same way that a Dumas novel mixes different ingredients. Zafón’s book also reflects on the fate of books and book reading, with characters discussing the decline in reading, which Fermín blames on cinema and the encroaching medium of television. In fact television hasn’t quite taken over yet in Spain during the time of the novel’s events. But cinema, a medium that initially set out to entertain the illiterate masses, seems to foreshadow the influence of television in Fermín’s mind.

‘The Shadow of the Wind’ is a novel that offers entertainment, amusement, intelligence and good writing. Beautifully translated by Lucia Graves, it casts a spell over the reader from the very first page. For who can resist the ancient Cemetery of Forgotten Books and the chance to explore its mysteries?

“Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens … When a library disappears, or a bookshop closes down, when a book is consigned to oblivion, those of us who know this place, its guardians, make sure it gets here. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader’s hands."

Kara Kellar Bell is a film and media graduate from the West of Scotland, with a passion for European novels, French films, silent cinema, and Brazilian music (everything from Daniela Mercury and other pop stars through to bossa nova). As a writer, she likes to have room to move around creatively, so she’s not located in one genre. She writes realism and also stories of a more fantastic nature, usually grounded to some extent in the real world. She also takes delight in writing across the sexual spectrum, and as a bisexual, considers it important to remind people that things are not always black and white, either/or, in sexuality or in gender. For a selection of Kara’s writing on the Showcase section of this site, click here

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.