"The Shadow of the Wind" by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, translated by Lucia Graves
Reviewed by: Nikki Tranter

"The Shadow of the Wind" is a frolic through 1940s Spain with Daniel Sempere, a young wannabe-writer on a quest to find the mysterious author of a rare and extraordinary book. In the beginning, Carlos Ruiz Zafon's novel successfully blends action, horror and romance while conveying its theme of the eternal nature of stories, but as it goes on the adventure proves tiresome as the author's twists and turns become increasingly repetitive and trivial.

The book begins with Daniel's bookseller father introducing him to The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a creepy old library filled with books long without readers, those deemed unsuccessful and unnecessary. Daniel's choice, "The Shadow of the Wind" by Julian Carax, is a thrilling read, causing the youngster to become obsessed with finding all Carax's other works. Such a thing isn't as easy as a visit to the local library, however. Carax died in mysterious circumstances some years before, and, Daniel discovers, to make matters bizarre, a mysterious man with a burned face wants the author's entire legacy destroyed and is systematically ridding the world of all remaining copies of Carax's books.

So begins Daniel's trip to the seedy world of Julian Carax, a world populated by shifty publishers, sadistic detectives and several love-struck dames. Daniel's obsession with Carax's writing becomes an obsession with his life: just what is it about this man that has everyone who knew him so nervous?

Initially, finding the answers to these questions is compelling for the reader as well as for Daniel, with Zafon mischievously twisting his plot in delightfully disturbing knots with each new piece of information more thrilling than the last. After 300 pages or so of this twisting, though, the whole thing starts to cave in on itself, and what begins as clever storytelling comes to mirror the most contrived of soap opera scripts: Daniel's in love with a blind lady who digs Carax as much as he does, but she knows things she's not ready to divulge to him, so he runs off and grows up a bit before involving himself with his best friend's sister, while receiving relationship advice from his odd and rather pungent co-worker who has a secret or two of his own. And so on.

There's a lot of interesting stuff about post-war Spain and the consequences of staunch family loyalty here, but with so many stories going on and so many characters tangled into them (so much so that numerous times the author re-introduces them), none of it lingers long enough to be especially powerful. The biggest casualty in all this is Carax, whose story ends up all but lost in the melodrama. The kinds of genuine gasps this book delivers in its first half are so rare these days that they make the unsuccessful second half just that much more disappointing. 2 stars.

Publisher:  Penguin, 2004, $24.95
ASIN/ISBN: 1594200106