Every Book’s Final Resting Place

Captivating fiction resonates long after the physical act of reading the book is complete.

Captivating fiction resonates long after the physical act of reading the book is complete. Characters, events, and descriptions, if they are meaningfully ambiguous and cyclical, as the best writing strives to be, resound in our intellects as we ruminate on the nuances and undercurrents in the stream of ideas that a novel represents. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, the story of a story within The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, clever and multilayered, will engage you in the various turns that the plot takes in this unusual and ultimately rewarding novel.

The lauded and eccentric Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote in his short story “The Library of Babel,” “I suspect that the human species—the unique species—is about to be extinguished, but the library will endure: illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly motionless, equipped with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret.” Without ever mentioning Borges, The Shadow of the Wind novelizes and expands on this single sentence.

Set in post-World War II Barcelona, the story begins with the voice of 10-year-old Daniel as he recollects his first visit to The Cemetery of Forgotten Books. Daniel’s father, an antiquarian bookseller, explains, “When a library disappears or a bookshop closes down, when a book is consigned to oblivion, those of us that know this place, its guardians, make sure that it gets here.” The Cemetery is “a place of mystery,” guarded by watchmen, where one final copy of any book is saved from disappearing forever. As tradition dictates, a first-time visitor must adopt a long-forgotten book, read it, and keep it alive. Daniel’s selected book, The Shadow of the Wind by Julián Carax, opens a mystery, a dangerous search, and hastens Daniel’s maturity over the next two decades of his life.

A book is never just a book, an inanimate object, but instead an idea formed in the imperfect and conflicted mind of an author from often unrealized motivations that can range from saintly to nefarious. Is a character part of the author, or is the author part of the character? The Shadow of the Wind is fiction, but as Daniel matures and searches for Carax, he realizes that elements of the story may offer clues to the author’s disappearance. Hence, the mystery driving the narrative, like a spiral staircase, dimly lit, twisting through the fog above, end point unknown.

As Daniel explains to his girlfriend Bea at one point, “It’s a story of love, of hatred, and of the dreams that live in the shadow of the wind.”

All copies of Carax’s book are believed to have been destroyed until Daniel plucks one from a dusty hiding place, reads it, and begins inquiring after the author’s other novels and attempting to learn more about him. Under painful personal circumstances, Carax had fled Spain years earlier and is believed to have died after a long exile in Paris.

A mysterious figure, with a bitter score to settle, is following Daniel in a quest to steal and destroy his copy of The Shadow of the Wind. This ominous and leering person resembles Laín Coubert, a central figure in Carax’s novel; he is not reluctant to use violence to carry out his goals. Still, at the end, we learn Coubert’s true identity, and it is a measure of Zafón’s skill that we can feel sympathy for him.

This story has all the elements of a suspenseful novel—a consistently revelatory plot, well-drawn characters, nary a sentence of flabby prose, and a world the reader can visualize. But the appeal of The Shadow of the Wind is that it does not fit into any one literary genre. These mood-setting sentences promise a Gothic novel: “A cold slashing breeze swept the streets, scattering strips of mist in its path. The steely sun snatched copper reflections from the roofs and belfries of the Gothic quarter.” Or is it a passionate love story? Here we are inside the young Daniel’s thoughts: “I spent almost all morning daydreaming in the back room, conjuring up images of Bea. I visualized her naked skin under my hands, and it seemed to me that I could almost savor her sweet breath.” Or is it a vampirish horror story? “At first all they saw was a pale, tremulous man who seemed at death’s door as he smiled at them with blood showing on the corners of his thin lifeless lips.”

As Borges presages, at story’s end, the library, that sanctuary of ideas, endures. An older and wiser Daniel walks through the streets of a misty Barcelona in the early morning.

He holds the hand of his own 10-year-old son, “whose eyes are intoxicated with the mystery of the promise his father made him at dawn, the promise of The Cemetery of Forgotten Books.” And so, we are brought back to the beginning. Daniel whispers to us in the first pages of this story a truth that any reader discovers: “the echo of words that we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how we learn or forget—we will return.”

The Shadow of the Wind is the first of four books featuring many of the same characters and The Cemetery of Forgotten Books. I am enjoying the subsequent books in the series and I suspect readers will as well.