Published Quarterly by Lifeloom.com

"Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive." Sir Walter Scott

Spring 2004 Volume II, issue 1

Nicki Leone earned her B.A. in Russian and Middle Eastern History from Boston College in 1988. One of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, an annual book festival for mystery readers and writers, she currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, as well as on the Advisory Board of the Southeastern Booksellers Association. Ms. Leone writes book reviews for a number of magazines, and is an on-air book reviewer and commentator. Here Ms. Leone reviews The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Luis Zafon. Direct correspondence to Nicki Leone or to editor@lifeloom.com. The Shadow of the Wind

           I spent this holiday weekend, as I do every year, with friends who have a makeshift cabin in the woods far from the many things that claim my daily attention: no cable tv, no email, no phones, in truth, no electricity. Every memorial day weekend a bunch of us gather with tents and bug spray and musical instruments, if we are so inclined, and play music around a campfire by the banks of a small stream that, 150 miles further south, becomes the more respectable Tar River before it spills its muddy water into Pamlico Sound.

             I am not one of the musically inclined sitting by the fire—I’ll sing along to the songs, softly, well aware that I’m slightly off key and my rhythm is more uncertain than even the second fiddle player, who has been happily drinking all night. Mostly, I’m just happy to sit and listen, either to the music, or to the kind of fond conversation that can only occur between friends who only see each other this one time of year. This is a gathering that has been going on for over twenty-five years; now the children who used to roast marshmallows have children of their own, who like to pester the friends of their parents for stories about the wild younger days. And, because this is a campfire in the middle of the woods, for ghost stories.

             Ghost stories were what consumed me over the weekend. As usual when I am going to be gone for a few days, my packing is minimal in the extreme; a haphazard selection of shorts and jeans. I spend the most time trying to decide what I will take to read, and it isn’t unusual for me to bring along more books than clothes, (because I never know what I’ll be in the mood for). So while others sat dozing by the banks of the river, or gossiping over trailside coffee, I sat and read; losing myself in a book called The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon as completely as I had lost myself in the woods.

             This novel, translated from its original Spanish, has remained steadfastly on the bestseller lists in Spain, France, and Germany for over a year, before someone finally decided that such interest might warrant an American edition. It turned out to be a lovely, creepy, gothic story that lent itself well to reading by flashlight as the twilight settled over the trees, and the air filled with the soft cries of hunting owls and the even softer glimpses of bats flitting through the gloom at the edge of the firelight.

             It begins with a young boy named Daniel who, waking up in a terror because he can no longer remember the face of his mother who died a year before, is taken by his father, a bookseller, to a magical house in the depths of an ancient neighborhood of Barcelona called “The Cemetery of Forgotten Books.” This, it turns out, is an old and secret library where book dealers bring copies of books that no one remembers, to await the day they will be rediscovered and loved. His father tells Daniel to choose a book from the shelves, to love and care for. Daniel, after wandering around the labyrinthine stacks, picks out a novel called The Shadow of the Wind, by Julian Carax, a writer neither he nor his father had ever heard of.

             He read through the night, only closing the final pages in the grey light of dawn. And he emerges filled with a zeal to read everything else ever written by this unknown, forgotten author. But as Daniel starts to make inquiries, he discovers that not only is the fate of Julian Carax shrouded in mystery, but someone has apparently been systematically setting fire to all of his books, and indeed it is doubtful as to whether any still even exist (Carax never having been exactly a popular author). More oddly still, as Daniel continues his hunt, things begin to happen to him that mirror events in the book he has just read. Before he can realize how it could have happened, he is lost in a maze of intrigue and shadows, a fly struggling in a vast web.

           The Shadow of the Wind is to all appearances as gothic a story as it gets; ancient crumbling Spanish villas are cursed by ghosts of heathen priestess and inhabited by beautiful, but blind, women in white. Hidden family crypts are discovered behind hastily bricked up walls. Sinister figures follow Daniel as he traces his way through the life of Julian Carax, always on the edge of his vision. Tragic women, desperate love affairs, and the ever-present threat of some otherworldly form of justice—or perhaps I should say retribution—literally swirl at Daniel’s heels where ever he goes in his obsessive quest for the truth. The symbolism, the atmosphere, and the story of several doomed lovers make the book close cousins with anything ever written by Edgar Allen Poe or Emily Bronte.

           But in the end, despite the ghosts and the crumbling mansions and the malevolent portents, I shy away from calling this a truly gothic novel. “Gothic” isn’t so much about the haunted castles as it is about the worm in the apple, the inescapable ruin in our own souls. The characters in a truly gothic novel are damned from the beginning, and nothing, NOTHING, they can do will ever allow them to escape their fate.

           The fates are certainly conspiring to force Daniel down each path he treads. Still, it is a story of redemption, not damnation. It was also the perfect story to read, by flashlight, in to the wee hours of the night, while owls hooted overhead and unseen creatures rustled softly just beyond the circle of light.

Copyright 2004 by Nicki Leone

"Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive." Sir Walter Scott