Spain

Book: The Shadow of the Wind

Author: Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Original Title: La sombra del viento

Translator: Lucia Graves

Finished: August 2024

The Shadow of the Wind is the story of Daniel Sempere, the son of a bookseller, and Julian Carax, the author of a novel that Daniel finds in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a repository of rare and endangered books. We learn Julian's story as Daniel does through characters that can provide different pieces of the puzzle or try to deter Daniel from pursuing the truth about Julian's fate and why his book ended up in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.

This book was recommended to me by a few different people over the years and has been on my TBR list for awhile. Despite the book-focused story, it took me a few tries to get far enough into this that I was hooked. It starts off well with young Daniel's visit to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, where he falls in love with the titular novel and becomes curious about its author. I am very bad about remembering details, but it seemed like there were a lot of random characters and plots introduced before Daniel really made progress in his search for Julian Carax. Do I really need to know about the music teacher of Daniel's first love and how she spurned Daniel for him?

What I did enjoy were all the descriptions of Barcelona and how Daniel navigated around the city to find clues about Carax. And the Spanish history during their civil war in the 1930s that immediately preceded World War II. This is what, for me, sparked an interest in this challenge of reading a book set in every country in the world, ideally by a native author. While the Spanish Civil War is not secret history, I had not learned a lot about it in school. With so many countries in the world, there is no way to formally teach extensive histories of them all, but reading historical fiction can evoke particular times in a country's past.