The Shadow Of The Wind

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
It comes encumbered with the baggage of being compared to "One Hundred years of Solitude" and "The Name Of The Rose", but has neither the Magic Realism of a Marquez nor Eco's frequent digressions into semiotics-influenced discourses on Middle Age politics, philosophy and theology.

What Carlos Ruiz Zafon's gives you is pure escapism. Shadow Of The Wind is pure Gothic Melodrama replete with the heated passions and heady emotions without which the genre itself becomes pretty pointless.

Set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War in a Barcelona under the Franco dictatorship, Shadow tells the tale of Daniel Sempere, initiated by his book seller father into the secret Cemetary of Forgotten Books, a huge library of old, forgotten tomes lovingly looked after by old caretaker Isaac Montfort. Tradition dictates that initiates to this forgotten library adopt one book and keep it safe for life.

When Daniel quickly becomes a fan of Julian Carax, author of his chosen book (the titular Shadow Of The Wind)and discovers that a horribly disfigured man who goes by the moniker of one of the book's characters Lain Courbert, is systematically hunting down and burning every copy of Carax's novels, he is plunged into a mystery to uncover Courbert's origins while evading the attentions of the ruthlessly sadistic Inspector Fumero and navigating a passionate but potentially doomed romance with the gorgeouus sister of his best friend.

Scratch beneath it's potboiler surface and some scenes of genuine pathos appear. Shadow is ultimately a novel of unfulfilled longing and unrequited love, with Julian's tragic life at it's epicentre, his downward spiral into sadness, despair, melancholy and ultimately rage at his failed romance with the rich and beautiful Penelope Aldaya fuelling the plot and rippling outwards to envelope and affect the lives of several characters in the book in dramatic and even horrible ways.

As chief protagonist and narrator, Daniel is blandness personified while Fumero never breaks out of the Evil Incarnate sketch he's boxed in. And Zafon proves himself the flip side of Isabel Allende in his inability to write convincingly about the opposite sex. See an echo of Allende's continued potrayal of all Latin men as macho, boorish rapists in Zafon's shading of his female characters as gorgeous femme fatales and nothing more.

So breathe a sigh of sharp relief for Fermin Romero de Torres, the best realised character of the book. Daniels' best friend, his father's assistant, an ex-spy and rakish lover, Fermin's magisterial lectures on women, romance and politics provide some much needed relief from the relentless melodrama.

Spiced with steamy sex, graphic violence, a crackling mystery and passionate romances, The Shadow Of The Wind is the perfect beach/flight/lazy morning/rainy night read. A crackling read as long as you're not looking for Marquez's Magic or Eco's Echo.

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