Carlos Ruis Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

The Shadow of the Wind is the sequel to Carlos Ruis Zafón's wonderful The Angel's Game.  The novel centers on Daniel Sempere, son of a quiet, sorrowful bookshop owner, who adopts a long-lost novel of the same name by the tragic Julián Carax, a woefully failed writer who earns his bread playing the piano in a Parisian brothel.  A faceless man bearing the name of one of Carax's characters has been tracking down every copy of the author's unsuccessful books and burning them.

As in Angel's Game, the prose are beautifully, willfully overwrought, celebrating and reveling the gothic genre, with its abandoned mansions, shady men in overcoats, an etherial, blind beauty, kand rain, always rain.  Zafón's style of writing might well be the subject of a line within his text.

"We'll make a deal," he said. "Tomorrow ... bring your precious find with you so that I can examine it properly, and I'll tell you what I know about Julián Carax.  Quid pro quo."
"Quid pro what?"
"Latin, young man.  There's no such thing as dead languages, only dormant minds."

The novel is willfully, wonderfully antiquated, baroque and intricate.  It is set in the 1950s, a time of great change, and television rears its wretched head now and again, though only as a subject of rhetoric:

'Television, my dear Daniel, is the Antichrist, and I can assure you that after only three or four generations, people will no longer even know how to fart on their own and humans will return to living in caves, to medieval savagery, and to the general state of imbecility that slugs overcame back in the Pleistocene era.  Our world will not die as a result of the bomb, as the papers say, it will die of laughter of banality, of making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that.'

The Shadow of the Wind is, at base, a love story, but not the love story of any of the star-crossed lovers who fill out its plot -- of Daniel and Bea, of Julian and Penelope (or Julian and Nuria), nor even of the rakish but lovable Fermín and his unlikely paramour Bernarda.  It is the love story of those few of us who truly love books, preferably old book, forgotten books, unwanted and abandoned books, of those who think that books are not only worth reading, but worth living and dying for.

The bookshop allows us to live modestly, but I can't imagine myself doing anything else.  Our sales lessen year by year ... Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all out heard and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.  Every month we receive offers to turn our bookshop into a store selling televisions, girdles, or rope-soled shoes.  They won't get us out of here unless it's feetfirst.

While The Shadow of the Wind begins more slowly, and has more light and humorous moments than Angel's Game, by the end it is just as compelling and absorbing.  Read it, and see what all this fuss about books is about.