Shadow of the Wind
by Carlos Luiz Zafon (487 pages)
From Publisher:
Ruiz Zafón's novel, a bestseller in his native Spain, takes the satanic
touches from Angel Heart and stirs them into a bookish intrigue à la
Foucault's Pendulum. The time is the 1950s; the place, Barcelona. Daniel
Sempere, the son of a widowed bookstore owner, is 10 when he discovers a
novel, The Shadow of the Wind, by Julián Carax. The novel is rare, the
author obscure, and rumors tell of a horribly disfigured man who has
been burning every copy he can find of Carax's novels. The man calls
himself Laín Coubert-the name of the devil in one of Carax's novels. As
he grows up, Daniel's fascination with the mysterious Carax links him to
a blind femme fatale with a "porcelain gaze," Clara Barceló; another
fan, a leftist jack-of-all-trades, Fermín Romero de Torres; his best
friend's sister, the delectable Beatriz Aguilar; and, as he begins
investigating the life and death of Carax, a cast of characters with
secrets to hide. Officially, Carax's dead body was dumped in an alley in
1936. But discrepancies in this story surface. Meanwhile, Daniel and
Fermín are being harried by a sadistic policeman, Carax's childhood
friend. As Daniel's quest continues, frightening parallels between his
own life and Carax's begin to emerge. Ruiz Zafón strives for a literary
tone, and no scene goes by without its complement of florid, cute and
inexact similes and metaphors (snow is "God's dandruff"; servants obey
orders with "the efficiency and submissiveness of a body of well-trained
insects"). Yet the colorful cast of characters, the gothic turns and
the straining for effect only give the book the feel of para-literature
or the Hollywood version of a great 19th-century novel.
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