Shadow of the Wind: Summary and book reviews of Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, plus links to an excerpt from Shadow of the Wind and a biography of Carlos Ruiz Zafon.
Shadow of the Wind
by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Hardcover: Apr 2004,
496 pages.
Paperback: Jan 2005,
496 pages.
Barcelona, 1945 - just after the war, a great world city lies in shadow, nursing its wounds, and a boy named Daniel awakes on his eleventh birthday to find that he can no longer remember his mother’s face. To console his only child, Daniel’s widowed father, an antiquarian book dealer, initiates him into the secret of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a library tended by Barcelona’s guild of rare-book dealers as a repository for books forgotten by the world, waiting for someone who will care about them again. Daniel’s father coaxes him to choose a volume from the spiraling labyrinth of shelves, one that, it is said, will have a special meaning for him. And Daniel so loves the novel he selects, The Shadow of the Wind by one Julian Carax, that he sets out to find the rest of Carax’s work. To his shock, he discovers that someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book this author has written. In fact, he may have the last one in existence. Before Daniel knows it his seemingly innocent quest has opened a door into one of Barcelona’s darkest secrets, an epic story of murder, magic, madness and doomed love. And before long he realizes that if he doesn’t find out the truth about Julian Carax, he and those closest to him will suffer horribly.
As with all astounding novels, The Shadow of the Wind sends the mind groping for comparisons—The Crimson Petal and the White? The novels of Arturo Pérez-Reverte? Of Victor Hugo? Love in the Time of Cholera?—but in the end, as with all astounding novels, no comparison can suffice. As one leading Spanish reviewer wrote, "The originality of Ruiz Zafón’s voice is bombproof and displays a diabolical talent. The Shadow of the Wind announces a phenomenon in Spanish literature." An uncannily absorbing historical mystery, a heart-piercing romance, and a moving homage to the mystical power of books, The Shadow of the Wind is a triumph of the storyteller’s art.
Shadow of the Wind is a complex and sometimes long winded novel (480 pages) that has drawn comparisons to books such as The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum. It combines elements of romance, mystery and crime into one big paella of a book, while also exploring many aspects of love - the love of a good book, the love of parents for their children, of unrequited, unspoken and rejected love and of love lost. (Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Richard Eder, The New York Times
The melodrama and complications of Shadow, expertly translated by Lucia Graves, can approach excess, though it's a pleasurable and exceedingly well-managed excess. We are taken on a wild ride -- for a ride, we may occasionally feel -- that executes its hairpin bends with breathtaking lurches.
Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
… anyone who enjoys novels that are scary, erotic, touching, tragic and thrilling should rush right out to the nearest bookstore and pick up The Shadow of the Wind. Really, you should.
Entertainment Weekly
[T]here is no question that Wind is wondrous.... [M]asterful, meticulous plotting and extraordinary control over language.... The Shadow of the Wind is ultimately a love letter to literature, intended for readers as passionate about storytelling as its young hero.
Publishers Weekly
Ruiz Zafón strives for a literary tone, and no scene goes by without its complement of florid, cute and inexact similes and metaphors...Yet the colorful cast of characters, the gothic turns and the straining for effect only give the book the feel of para-literature or the Hollywood version of a great 19th-century novel.
Library Journal - Lawrence Olszewski
This complex, Byzantine, at times longwinded work, which spent more than 60 weeks on Spain's best sellers list, throws together mystery, romance, and crime into one big mix like an olla podrida....Even the plot and characters of Carax's fictitious work are interwoven into this meticulously crafted mosaic.
Kirkus Reviews
The Shadow of the Wind will keep you up nights-and it'll be time well spent. Absolutely marvelous.
La Vanguardia
Zafónmania... A thriller, a historical novel and a comedy of manners, but above all, the story of a tragic love...with great narrative skill, the author interweaves his plots and enigmas, like a set of Russian dolls in an unforgettable story about the secrets of the heart and the enchantment of books, maintaining the suspense right to the very last page.
La Razon
As magnetic as The Dumas Club, as unsettling as The Mystery of the Haunted Crypt and with a plot as complex and well rounded as The Name of The Rose - to be recommended one hundred percent.
Suddeutsche Zeitung
I was enthralled by Zafón's book and it gave me many hours of great delight. Not only because the story is set in a book shop, not only because it is about the search and the hunt for books and there is a library of forgotten books to be discovered, but because The Shadow of the Wind is suspenseful like a thriller, poetic like a love story, sometimes mysterious like its title, and because it describes the characters and the storyline so wonderfully that the reader wants to be a part of it. A paean to reading and to the love of books.
Westdeutscher Rundfunk
What a magnificent labyrinth a book can be... the Spanish author keeps us at it with his intense narrative style and delivers to the full what one would call a wonderfully good read... Already one talks of Zafónmania. Now it is your turn.
El Pais
The publishing phenomenon of the last year and a half.
Recent Reader Reviews
Rated of 5
by Elizabeth Ohhhh...outstanding...loved it I would give the Shadow of the Wind more than ten stars if that were possible...this is my all-favorite book. I didn't want it to end.
I loved all the twists and turns and connections of the characters and the surprise letter at the end that... Read More
Rated of 5
by Chach The Shadow of the Wind This book was amazing! I really loved it. It was enthralling with a magical ending that just took your breath away when the whole story unraveled. Definitely is a must read on everyones list.
Rated of 5
by Punchb0wl The Shadows of The Wind A book that flows like poetry, from the descriptive language used for Barcelona to the characters so full of life that you feel a sense of loss when you finish the book. I've read this book twice, lost 2 copies to friends and bought a copy for my... Read More
Rated of 5
by Kim Best book I read in 2007 I'd put off reading this novel for awhile, since I typically have trouble concentrating on books that have been translated from another language. It sat on my shelf for about two years, until I got tired of my reading friends telling me to stop... Read More
Rated of 5
by reader Best novel from Spain to date This writer is painfully and obviously well read. With references from Nero to Gertrude Stein He shows off quite a bit but in spite of all of that the story is well put together and completely consuming. What a pleasant surprise.
Rated of 5
by AndrewL
I won't say much, except to say that it is literature's job to take on a journey through the impossibility of our emotions, to let the ephemeral and the mysterious lead us, where in our normal lives the ordinary and the safe, the cognitive and... Read More
There was no special fanfare when Spanish
publisher, Planeta, published Carlos Ruiz Zafón's fifth book
(but his first for adults) The Shadow
of the Wind, in 2002. However, it took off,
spending more than 60 weeks on the bestseller lists in Spain,
and has now been translated into 20
languages. Zafón says that the young adult novel
was 'never my natural genre' (as far as I can see, none of his
earlier works are available in English).
The paradox of The Shadow of the Wind, according to
Ruiz Zafón, is that it could only have been written in Los
Angeles, his home for the past 10 years. He says "I thought it would be a place that would
allow me to keep working," but "it turned out to be a place
that I found quite liberating. A...
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U.S. ebook sales up in 2012, but rate of growth is slowing(May 16 2013) In 2012, trade book sales (i.e. non academic book sales) rose 6.9%, to $15.049 billion, and e-book sales continued to grow, although the rate of growth...
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