Reader’s Recommendation: The Shadow of The Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

A book about a hidden book, then you may think it’s the mystery of its author. Overlapping this, we come to draw parallels with the narrator themself. Many times, there’s hilarious quips from a sprouting character, good stern friends and beautiful ingenues.

The Shadow of The Wind is about recounting stories. Confessions, the rarest romantic payoff, occurs mercifully more than once in this book. There’s such beautiful evocativeness in Spanish literature. At one moment you’re imagining the icing cake marble of a historic town. In another chapter, the casual disrepair and haunting atmosphere which wouldn’t be out of place in a Silent Hill game. The piteous nature of how human beings have their fancies, foibles, and dark hearts. Places fall into states of disrepair along with their masters, and time hones and polishes the fond potential others have to make lives better.

It has a story as well, this particular book. A colleague was kind enough to give this, as a gift. An ice breaker. Older than me, stronger looking. The only one the really discuss literature (at least in this place of work). I know in my heart I should do the same, give this very same book to another person. And its wisdom of a city that’s a breathing person, unravelling people who are already fixed in time but without pasts, recalling and touching the ghosts and glass of warm romances destined for danger, or all but forgotten.

For its size, this is a book that will be read very quickly as it knows how to pace itself

The Shadow of The Wind is best appreciated by metaphorically walking into it, and then through it. Many years of neat reflection, presented through multiple bubbled layers of the most important recollections of people’s lives give this novel an ethereal quality. The prose never drags, remains relatable, and gives a card shuffle of all the emotions one can feel while reading. Curiosity, horror, hatred, hope. What life is in the days we build associations, when lifestyles fall, when we ponder the backstory of the people we meet and learn how they feel.