Perhaps it's not the style these days, but when I read a book I want to feel the cracks in the sidewalk beneath a character's feet as he walks down the street, smell the odors that waft from the bakery, and feel the cold wind bite my cheeks. It’s all very well and good to let us know what things and people look like, but I want to experience the world and be immersed in it. If I wanted to be a passive observer I'd watch television instead of reading a book.
If you share that sentiment then you'll probably take as much pleasure in reading The Angel’s Game, the latest offering from Carlos Ruiz Zafón. Set in Barcelona, the majority of the action takes place in the period before the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. The book opens in 1917 with the narrator, David Martín, recalling how that year when he was seventeen, he was first paid for his writing. Instead of this being a pleasant memory, however, he believes the moment a writer first sells a piece he puts a price on his soul and becomes doomed. When the price of a man’s soul is mentioned in the first paragraph of a book, it's a good bet the story is going to have something to do with the forces of darkness and a descent into one type of Hell or another is in the cards.
Before we take that plunge, Zafón makes sure we know why it happens to David; not only was he abysmally poor as a child, but he was raised by his alcoholic, ex-military father. Zafón manages to capture the real horror of what poverty does to a child, taking away his or her expectations of anything good. A copy of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations makes David realize that the idea of a poor person having expectations of any sort is ridiculous; he’s lucky even that his father even allows him to attend school and learn to read and write. After beating David for wasting money on electricity in order to read the Dickens novel by night, his father begins to have a change of heart and allows David to buy books, but as David begins to have expectations of a relationship with him, his father is gunned down in front of him.
Article comments
1 - bob
This is the best, most perceptive, intelligent and most on the money review I've read about this novel. Bravo. You nailed it. It is inspiring to find such smart commentary about books.