Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Labyrinth of the Spirits is the latest (and the last?) in his sprawling Spanish gothic Cemetery of Forgotten Books series. It has been several years since I read the previous three volumes of what I then thought was a trilogy of novels: The Shadow of the Wind, The Angel's Game, and The Prisoner of Heaven.Like the other three installments, Labyrinth is filled with beautiful decay, crumbling palaces, manias for obscure novels, and madness. It is, though, decidedly darker than I recall the others being. Set in the period of Franco's repressive corruption, there is plenty of moral ambiguity and outright horror to go around. There are nested stories within stories, and ultimately, we are thrust backward only to learn that there has been a meta-narrative at work over all four novels. Their plots are all quite complex, and I admit I only vaguely remembered the other three, but that didn't matter a great deal. A reader could certainly start with this one, and then work backward, so that obscure details would be revealed in what would then work as prequels.
This is a book for lovers of books, for those of us who fantasize about moving to Barcelona to work in an old bookshop surrounded by the glories of fallen empires.
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