The Shadow of the Wind
Carlos Ruiz Zafon's book, based in post-war Barcelona, has little bit of everything - mystery, deceit, love, romance, lust, anger, horror, passion for literature, coming-of-age, history and a lot of shadows and fogs! What is amazing is that Zafon is able to bring all this together in a coherent storyline, keep the readers on the edge of their seats almost throughout the book and not let it all degenerate into pulp fiction that is synonymous with Dan Brown's work.
The story starts with Daniel, a 10-year old boy being lead into the Cemetery of Forgotten Books by his father and told to pick a book that he will guard for ever. Daniel picks up Julián Carax's "The Shadow of the Wind" and ends up mesmerized enough by the book to go hunting for the author. But soon he finds out that he is not alone in the quest. A mysterious figure, disfigured and stinking of burned paper is bent on burning all of Julián Carax's work while the city police chief, Ignacio Fumero turns out to be a nemesis of both Daniel as well as Carax.
As each incident peels off another layer of the narrative skin, another seem to grown somewhere inside, never revealing the full extent of the turmoil that is Carax's (and Daniel's by extension) life until the very end. Sometimes 'excess' would seem a good word to describe these layers but therein lies the magic. Letting Daniel's coming-of-age incidents mesh with Carax's life, Zafon is able to tell two stories (with a blurred line separating them) at once and delivers on both of them.
If you liked this book, you may also like "The Kite Runner" by Khaled Hosseini, "The Historian" by Elizabeth Kostova, "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Vintage Contemporaries)" by Mark Haddon.
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