By Carlos Ruiz Zafon, translated from the Spanish by Lucia Graves
Spanish author Zafon brings the culture of post WW II Barcelona to life in this book about a young man, Daniel, who visits the ‘cemetery of forgotton books’ with his father as a 10 year old boy. While there he learns that each visitor to the cemetery must choose a book and commit to preserving that book for his lifetime. The book he chooses, Shadow of the Wind by Julian Carax turns out to be a compelling novel by a tragic figure. Soon Daniel learns that someone is systematically seeking out and destroying every existing copy of Carax’s works. The novel follows Daniel’s life from age ten to young adulthood as he becomes obsessed with discovering the truth about Carax and about the mysterious figure determined to erase his life’s work.
I found the descriptions of the culture and architecture of Barcelona in the post WWII era to be very evocative and engaging. Zafon is a good storyteller and the characters are psychologically complex and well developed. I’m not sure how many pages the book is but it must be long because the audio version is 19 hours. (That’s about three weeks of commuting for me). The audio book was well voiced by more than one actor but I found the piano accompaniment to be cheesy and distracting. Thankfully the vast majority of the production did not have any such accompaniment.
While I’m not sure I would have persevered to read the entire book in a written format, I did find it enjoyable and engaging. I would recommend this book to mystery lovers and lovers of ‘forgotten’ books.
