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[books 2010] Shadow of the Wind
Apr. 5th, 2010 04:25 pm21. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I bought this in Savannah, and then discovered at my layover in Madrid that the Spanish have a whole genre of books like this.
This is the story of a young boy in Barcelona who finds a book called The Shadow of the Wind in 1945 and spends his childhood & youth trying to find out more about the author, a mysterious figure called Julian Carax. Someone is going around finding all surviving copies of Carax's books and burning them.
What it's really about is living through the Spanish civil war and the Franco regime. The reviews on the covers make a lot of comparisons to Allende, Borges and Garcia Marquez - I guess the Spanish-speaking world has a particular magical-realism way of dealing with living in repressive regimes.
This book is absolutely wonderful. The use of language is absolutely gorgeous throughout, even in translation (except in a very few places where the translation is a bit clunky, which is just odd, as it's mostly so good). Will definitely be looking out his other works as they become available in English. Allegedly, you don't need brilliant Spanish to access his young adult novels (no plans to release in English yet, as far as I can tell) so there's some incentive to improve my Spanish.
Reading this book has also reminded me that I've been meaning to read the authors listed above for years.
March reading stats
Books finished: 7
Non-fiction: 2
Library books: 1
Logically this means I've made a sizeable dent in the to-read pile, but it looks as big as ever (no, I haven't bought any more books this month).
I bought this in Savannah, and then discovered at my layover in Madrid that the Spanish have a whole genre of books like this.
This is the story of a young boy in Barcelona who finds a book called The Shadow of the Wind in 1945 and spends his childhood & youth trying to find out more about the author, a mysterious figure called Julian Carax. Someone is going around finding all surviving copies of Carax's books and burning them.
What it's really about is living through the Spanish civil war and the Franco regime. The reviews on the covers make a lot of comparisons to Allende, Borges and Garcia Marquez - I guess the Spanish-speaking world has a particular magical-realism way of dealing with living in repressive regimes.
This book is absolutely wonderful. The use of language is absolutely gorgeous throughout, even in translation (except in a very few places where the translation is a bit clunky, which is just odd, as it's mostly so good). Will definitely be looking out his other works as they become available in English. Allegedly, you don't need brilliant Spanish to access his young adult novels (no plans to release in English yet, as far as I can tell) so there's some incentive to improve my Spanish.
Reading this book has also reminded me that I've been meaning to read the authors listed above for years.
March reading stats
Books finished: 7
Non-fiction: 2
Library books: 1
Logically this means I've made a sizeable dent in the to-read pile, but it looks as big as ever (no, I haven't bought any more books this month).
