Book Review: The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Daniel Sempere was ten years old in 1945 when his father, a bookseller, took him to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books in their home city of Barcelona, Spain. A place known only to a select few, the tradition was that on his first visit, the visitor would find a book that would be "his." He would, from then on, have to ensure the book never disappeared, for that was the mission of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. It was place to rescue unwanted books, those discarded from libraries and liquidated from book stores.

Daniel's father takes him to the Cemetery at 5 a.m. "Now?" Daniel asks. "Some things can only be seen in shadows," his father replies. The Cemetery itself is described as "a basilica of shadows." Daniel entered the cavernous building with awe and finds himself drawn to a book, as if by fate: The Shadow of the Wind, by Julian Carax.

Daniel devours The Shadow of the Wind in one night, he's so taken by the story. But we see that from the very start this book will mean more to him than words on a page when he almost immediately finds a scene from the book repeated in his own life. He steps out on the balcony in the small hours of the night and sees a man, gazing in his direction, with one hand in his jacket. In The Shadow of the Wind, it is the devil who strikes this very pose when the protagonist goes out on his balcony at night.

It turns out that the fictional Shadow is very rare. Julian Carax's books never sold much in the first place, but it was rumored that some mysterious man had been buying them up and burning them. The day of his 16th birthday, Daniel meets the devil he saw from his balcony. The man has a burned face, and he intimates he wants to buy The Shadow of the Wind from Daniel and burn it. This frightens Daniel, and he goes back to the Cemetery to hide the book once again.

The rest of the book follows Daniel as he unravels the story of Julian Carax and unwittingly begins to follow the same path as Carax himself. Woven together are stories of the effects of war, the changing fortunes of the rich, the nature of love and courage, and, most of all, fate. The shadows of the dead fall long upon the living, shaping their outlooks, moving them along the path of time.

Article Author: Nancy Fontaine

Nancy Fontaine is a librarian and freelance writer living in New Hampshire with her husband, two cats, and every four years during presidential primary season, the national press.

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