Friday Feature: The Shadow of the Wind

Friday Feature is where we share books we love that have been out for several years. We don't want these treasures to get lost just because they aren't babies anymore!


Shadow of the Wind
By Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Lucia Graves (Translator)
pub. Feb 1, 2005
487 pages

Barcelona, 1945—Just after the war, a great world city lies in shadow, nursing its wounds, and a boy named Daniel awakes one day to find that he can no longer remember his mother’s face. To console his only child, Daniel’s widowed father, an antiquarian book dealer, initiates him into the secret of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a library tended by Barcelona’s guild of rare-book dealers as a repository for books forgotten by the world, waiting for someone who will care about them again.

Daniel’s father coaxes him to choose a book from the spiraling labyrinth of shelves, one that, it is said, will have a special meaning for him. And Daniel so loves the book he selects, a novel called The Shadow of the Wind by one Julián Carax, that he sets out to find the rest of Carax’s work. To his shock, he discovers that someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book this author has written. In fact, he may have the last of Carax’s books in existence.

Before Daniel knows it, his seemingly innocent quest has opened a door into one of Barcelona’s darkest secrets, an epic story of murder, magic, madness, and doomed love, and before long he realizes that if he doesn’t find out the truth about Julián Carax, he and those closest to him will suffer horribly.

***

This is almost a love letter to literature itself. I don't know how the English version compares to the original Spanish, but I think the translation into English is amazing. The descriptions are perfectly poetic (which means that they're lovely to read, but never try to steal the spotlight from the story itself).  I loved this book, the poetic writing, the mystery, the characters. Be forewarned there is some language (though very judiciously used, I never felt it to be gratuitous) and a few love scenes (which, with one slight exception are relegated to poetic descriptions, albeit, slightly dirty poetry).
I like that on the back cover it says "even the subplots have subplots". This is an amazing read and very engrossing!