The Shadow of the Wind
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Translated by Lucia Graves

Brenda Stones
posted 5 July 2007

‘After Don Quixote, The Shadow of the Wind is the most successful Spanish novel ever, and has sold seven million copies worldwide. It has been translated into over forty languages, received numerous international awards, and has been on the bestseller lists of several countries for more than four years’ – so says Orion Books.

So have you read it yet? And if not, why not? If you haven’t yet caught up with this particular international phenomenon, your reason may well be to do with the book being a translation, and in Britain we usually don’t catch up with translated bestsellers until well after other countries have taken them to their hearts. If we can’t immediately pronounce the author’s name, we somehow feel that it won’t be for us; that the cultural references will be beyond our experiences; and perhaps most especially, that the process of translation will detract from the integrity of the original language anyway.

Most of which in this case has no truth at all. The translator, for instance, is Lucia Graves, the daughter of Robert Graves, impeccably well qualified to undertake the reworking of this 400-page tome. The language is exquisite, the power of the narrative so compelling that it tugs you in from the very first sentence, and the author has an extraordinary technique for using emblematic dialogue, to seal and confirm each stage of the narrative.

But it is certainly true that the genre of this slightly old-fashioned story offers quite a contrast to the average British bestseller. It has an other-worldly, other-timely feel to it, reminiscent of the kind of fantasies one lost oneself in back in childhood, when there was all the time in the world to bury yourself in an extravagant epic. So it’s well worth putting a great slab of time aside to submerge yourself in this evocative, romantic masterpiece.

You cannot begin to distil the plot of The Shadow of the Wind: all you can say is that it is a kind of literary detective story, set in Barcelona after the Civil War, in which the young son of a bookseller sets out to trace the author of a magical novel he has discovered. But the narrative is actually built on layer upon layer of interlocking stories, like those intricate carved ivory balls where you glimpse another level chiselled beneath, but you can never extricate one layer from another. So just when you think you’ve reached the innermost key to the story, another skin is peeled away to reveal yet another dimension.

The characters tend to be absolute goodies and baddies, as in childhood stories – from beautiful damsels to evil policemen – but they still rouse our sympathy or antipathy when they re-enter the stage. You also feel flashes of recognition across the procession of characters – an unsettling edge of déjà vu, at the double-take of coincidence over time.

So what is it really all about? It’s about the ‘intimate ritual’ of reading, ‘the enchanted scent of promise that comes with all new books’, and the fear that ‘great readers are becoming more scarce by the day’; it’s about loyalty to friends and lovers, who leave weeping wounds in your life if you lose them at the height of youth; and ultimately it’s about the repeating patterns of life, the cycle of coincidence, which imprints itself on the sequence of our lives…

'Gabriel Garcia Marquez meets Umberto Eco meets Jorge Luis Borges’, says the New York Times Book Review; so can you really afford to ignore this captivating cult classic?