When the school year ended, my good friend and awesome colleague Paul Herring recommended I read Carlos Ruiz Zafron's The Shadow of the Wind, a book Paul bought in England. I'm such a creature of habit when it comes to reading, reading every book by the authors I love and staying close to the genres that pull me in most, I had no idea if I'd enjoy it. But I couldn't put the book down -- I absolutely loved it.
The novel is set in Barcelona (which gave vivid mental images of the sites I saw there five years ago) and follows bookstore owner Daniel's search for information about his favorite author, Julian Carax. Daniel's passion for Carax's book The Shadow of the Wind pulls him into a strange search for more information about the author and a dangerous cat and mouse game with a man threatening Daniel and his father. As the pages fly by and Daniel pulls more people into his search, though, it's difficult to pinpoint who is the cat and who is the mouse. The novel is a murder mystery, multiple love stories, insight into Spain's history of war and national turmoil, a coming of age story. It's about love and loneliness and the gray space between and how, sometimes, they overlap.
Daniel tells his love, Bea, early on in the story about his pursuits regarding Carax. He puts it best, saying the story is about "accursed books, about the man who wrote them, about a character who broke out of the pages of a novel so that he could burn it, about a betrayal and a lost friendship. It's a story of love, of hatred, and of the dreams that live in the shadow of the wind" (p. 182).
The novel is also about our connection with literature, how it pulls us in and lets us live somewhere else, with someone else through the last page. As he wraps up the multidimensional plot, Zafron says through Bea that "the art of reading is...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 our heart and mind" (p. 502). Zafron puts it perfectly; there is no way to elaborate more on the truth of reading.
