Ruiz Zafon enchants with this gripping narrative of a young man in Barcelona in the 1940s and 1950s. The story opens with our young protagonist, Daniel Sempere, as his father leads him to the Cemetery of Lost Books. There Daniel chooses a forgotten book to adopt and sets in motion a tapestry of interweaving tales, all converging at Daniel’s book.

 

“There are worse prisons than words,” says one character as she teaches a global truth as well as one specific to this book: once entrapped, I found myself reading this book constantly until I turned the last page of the epilogue. The story is fascinating and tragic. The characters are fascinating and they feel real (most of the time): there are those with whom I would love to be friends and others that I would tremble to know. And the prose! Ruiz Zafon uses language wonderfully, making each page delicious to consume.

 

I read the novel in Spanish, but I have heard only rave reviews of the English translation (The Shadow of the Wind). Professional reviewers were mostly superbly positive: Richard Eder of the New York Times describes it as “’Gabriel Garcia Marquez meets Umberto Eco meets Jorge Luis Borges’ for a sprawling magic show, exasperatingly tricky and mostly wonderful”; Michael Dirda of the Washington Post writes that, “anyone who enjoys novels that are scary,…touching, tragic, and thrilling should rush right out to…pick up The Shadow of the Wind.” Twice, as I carried the book with me in public, passers-by exclaimed quite literally how much they loved the book. This novel earns its enthusiasm.