The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

One Book You Wish Had Been Written

One of the problems with participating in online book discussions is that you discover all sorts of wonderful books you might not have heard about or considered reading before. For instance, Les’ description of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood makes me want to read it now, even though I have never been interested in true crime books, and reading about a gruesome murder doesn’t sound appealing at all. But still, it sounds so good…

Yes, it is a problem. I recently took a cursory inventory of the books on my shelf that I have not read yet, and it approached 100. I can’t believe I own a hundred books that I haven’t read, not to mention those that I want to read but haven’t acquired yet. Like In Cold Blood.

A few years ago, I came across a forum post on bookcrossing.com in which a member raved about Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. She said it was the best book she had read in years, and that it was so exciting and gripping that she could hardly put it down. Several other members wrote in agreement. I don’t know why this particular post struck a chord with me, but I decided that I needed to read this book immediately.

The Shadow of the Wind is a book about books, so I can see why people feel so strongly about it. It is about a young man who finds a mysterious book entitled “The Shadow of the Wind” by a man named Julian Carax. This book that he reads in one evening is so compelling to him that he sets out to find the author’s other works, only to discover that someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book Carax has ever written. I didn’t read The Shadow of the Wind in one evening, but it was still one of the best books I read that year because of its darned good plot: mysterious, suspenseful, emotional, romantic, and exciting.

The book I was reading and the book the fictional character read seemed to have a lot in common. They shared the same title, the same enthralling effect upon the reader. They even shared similar structural attributes, if not the same premise:

The novel told the story of a man in search of his read father, whom he never knew and whose existence was only revealed to him by his mother on her deathbed. The story of that quest became a ghostly odyssey in which the protagonist struggled to recover his lost youth, and in which a shadow of a cursed love slowly surfaced to haunt him until his last breath. As it unfolded, the structure of the story began to remind me of one of those Russian dolls that contain innumerable ever-smaller dolls within. Step by step the narrative split into a thousand stories, as if it had entered a gallery of mirrors, its identity fragmented into endless reflections.

“The Shadow of the Wind” had such a profound effect upon the characters in The Shadow of the Wind that I wish it really existed to read. But I wonder: both the real and the fictional books are so full of mirrors and self-references, perhaps they are one and the same after all.

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

tags: books about books book reviews bookcrossing thrillers Carlos Ruiz Zafón