Back to Reviews By Title - T

The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Text
Reviewed by John Whelan (Courtesy of Taranaki Daily News)

This translation of a best-selling Spanish novel is hard to describe but oh, so easy to praise. It is simply brilliant. It is a book within a book.

The story is that of a novel whose characters not only mirror the life surrounding its mysterious author but also the person reading it. That person starts out as a 10-year-old boy. He is taken by his father one day to a strange library where he stumbles across a book, The Shadow of the Wind, unaware that by reading it, it will change his life forever. It sounds very convoluted and contrived but it's not, just read it and enjoy.

The story is set in Barcelona at different times throughout the 1930s, 40s and 50s, encompassing the upheavals of the Civil War and World War II. You can almost smell the city and its inhabitants. The place, like the book itself, is full of intrigue and puzzles waiting to be solved.

The main character's explanation of what it's all about is perfect. It is "about accursed books, about the man who wrote them, about a character who broke out of the pages of a novel so that he could burn it, about betrayal and a lost friendship. It's a story of love, of hatred, and of dreams that live in the shadow of the wind."

Answers to the many questions are slowly revealed but never totally clear until the very end. There are so many characters woven into the story I found myself wondering how to keep track of them, but after a while it all makes sense. The writing is lyrical with a turn of phrase that stops you in your tracks.

It's a big read, a 500-page epic, absorbing, full of mystery, emotion and drama. This is a book to immerse yourself in, to totally lose yourself, a reminder of why we read – to be moved, transfixed and entertained. An extraordinary book.