Back in 2020 one of the greatest writers in substance and form left us. An author who convinced critics and who earned parallel popular recognition translated into bestsellers for all of his novels. Probably the most widely read Spanish writer after Cervantes, perhaps with the permission of Perez Reverte.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón, like many others, had already spent his good years of hard work in this sacrificial trade before the total explosion of The wind's shadow, his masterpiece (in my opinion and at the same unanimous opinion of the critics). Ruiz Zafón had previously studied youth literature, with the relative success that this unfair label of minor literature gave it for a genre intended for very laudable purposes. Nothing less than proselytizing new regular readers from an early age (adult literature ends up being nourished by readers who went through youthful reading almost inexcusably to get there).
You may have already assumed that in the highest part of this author's podium I am going to place La sombra del viento, of course. But beyond this piece of book there is more literary life after this author, and surely you can take some surprise in what I end up positioning behind.
Recommended novels by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The wind's shadow
I do not know if when writing this work Ruiz Zafón could already harbor the idea of its consequent sequels. I say this because the work is round in itself, despite its open and suggestive ending. It could have survived as an individual book, with its own entity and without risky derivations.
One dawn in 1945, a boy is led by his father to a mysterious hidden place in the heart of the old city: the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. There, Daniel Sempere finds a cursed book that changes the course of his life and drags him into a labyrinth of intrigues and secrets buried in the dark soul of the city.
The wind's shadow it is a literary mystery set in Barcelona in the first half of the twentieth century, from the last splendors of Modernism to the post-war darkness. Combining the techniques of the story of intrigue and suspense, the historical novel and the comedy of customs, The wind's shadow it is above all a tragic love story whose echo is projected through time.
With great narrative force, the author weaves plots and enigmas like Russian dolls in an unforgettable story about the secrets of the heart and the enchantment of books whose intrigue is maintained until the last page.
Marina
First surprise, I abandon the series of The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, which was born with the great work mentioned above, and I focus on this previous great novel. Valuing this nature of a youth novel and, without detracting from the aforementioned saga, I focus on individual books, unique creations, closed stories when reaching the last page ...
In 1980's Barcelona, Óscar Drai daydreams, dazzled by the modernist palaces near the boarding school where he studies. On one of his escapades he meets Marina, a girl in poor health who shares with Óscar the adventure of delving into a painful enigma of the city's past.
A mysterious post-war character set himself the greatest challenge imaginable, but his ambition dragged him down sinister paths whose consequences someone still has to pay today. «Fifteen years later, the memory of that day has returned to me.
I have seen that boy wandering in the mists of the France station and Marina's name has lit up again like a fresh wound. We all have a secret locked up in the attic of the soul. This one is mine."
The game of the angel
The very powerful imaginary of cemetery of forgotten books It would serve to elevate the final result of the tetralogy into a magnum opus of our time. The independence of each work plays for and against that perspective of unfathomable volume as that of a great Russian classical author. Because each novel is a kind of new focus on the changing Barcelona of the 20th century, it detaches itself from what was previously narrated while giving new energy to the plot to be presented.
On this occasion, the contradictory, and precisely for that reason, rabidly human David Martín becomes a planet around which beings pivot that give him their brightness and shadows, like an existence of unimaginable human tragicomedy in a supposedly "only" mystery novel. Everything seems to be cradled by a tangible mist like touch, capable of hurting the skin or caressing with overtones of eternity. Sleaze comes from the world determined to continue advancing despite everything, between alleys and offices where that, life, is usury and pettiness ...
There are loves that kill or that succumb to inexplicable spells. There is literature that can end up revealing the great truths about the divine and the human. There are necessary absences and forgetfulness but they are always stirred between dreams waiting for their moment for justice.
Everything moves with that point between romantic, gothic, creepy at times of a Barcelona that is already different in the hands of Ruíz Zafón, reaching the level of a dark enclave that glimpses the Mediterranean as a door to cemeteries of books awaiting the next inhabitants who They now expect little from life, except the blinding vision of the only possible truth as a mixture of everything, from the caress to the edge of steel, from the kiss to madness...
Other interesting books by Carlos Ruiz Zafón ...
The midnight palace
If the first novel fills the author with satisfaction and prevents him from seeing what his first work suffers from, all these vanities are cured in the second novel. That's what I detected in this book, once again a youth theme..., but, really, children and young people are always the great protagonists of this author's novels.
Calcutta, 1932: the heart of darkness. A train on fire goes through the city. A specter of fire sows terror in the shadows of the night. But that's only the beginning. On the eve of their sixteenth birthday, Ben, Sheere and their friends from the Chowbar Society must face the most terrible enigma in the history of the city of palaces. The people who populate its streets know that the true story was written in the invisible pages of their spirits, in their silent and hidden curses.
The city of steam
It is of little use to think about what was left to tell Carlos Ruiz Zafón. How many characters have remained silent and how many new adventures are stuck in that strange limbo, as if lost between the shelves of the graveyard of books.
With the ease that one was lost between dark and damp corridors, feeling that cold that reaches the bones, with aromas of paper and ink fermenting millions of possible stories. Labyrinths through which stories told with the perfection of the writer who made us live in another Barcelona and in another world move.
Any compilation will always know little. But hunger must be mitigated by any means possible, in light bites if that is what one has... Carlos Ruiz Zafón conceived this work as a recognition to his readers, who had followed him throughout the saga that began with The wind's shadow.
«I can conjure up the faces of children from the Ribera neighborhood with whom I sometimes played or fought in the street, but none that I wanted to rescue from the country of indifference. None except Blanca's. "
A boy decides to become a writer when he discovers that his inventions give him a little more interest from the rich girl who has stolen his heart. An architect flees Constantinople with plans for an impregnable library. A strange gentleman tempts Cervantes to write a book that has never existed. And Gaudí, sailing to a mysterious rendezvous in New York, delights in light and steam, the stuff that cities should be made of.
The echo of the great characters and motifs of the novels of The Cemetery of Forgotten Books it resounds in the stories of Carlos Ruiz Zafón - gathered for the first time, and some of them unpublished - in which the magic of the narrator ignites that made us dream like no one else.
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