La sombra del viento

Just finished The Shadow of the Wind and on a whole, I'm pretty happy with it being my first Holiday Read (TM) of the year. It's definitely a thriller, a pageturner as they say, with healthy doses of sex, violence and... OK, no rock'n'roll, but used books are kind of like rock'n'roll and there's a lot of those in it too. But it's a thriller written the way I wish more thrillers were; by a writer who might not be a genius but knows his craft, who can bring a setting and a character to life, make you smell the dusty old pages or the fresh blood, and keeps you turning the pages not by having a cliffhanger on every fifth page and killing someone else every time he runs out of plot, but simply by setting up a complex plot and then letting it unfold bit by bit. Oh, and I like the fact that he sets it in a fascist dictatorship just a few years after a very divisive civil war but doesn't make a huge deal of it, just lets it seep through without constantly spelling it out for the reader; it's become normal to the characters, after all. And while it's not exactly Pereira Declares, it touches upon the literature-as-resistance plot but turns it into something more personal than political. Plus, lots of gothic horror novel influences too, can't complain about that.

That's the good news. The bad news? Well, like others have said, it goes on a little too long for an ending that's a little too predictable. That comes with the territory, I guess. And while some of the characters are nicely drawn, others - in particular the women - seem like pawns, prizes or plot devices in the boys' game a little too often. (It feels a bit a propos that one of the major clues is sold for the price of a prostitute.) But hey, it's a machismo culture and of course that's part of the plot too, so I'll overlook that. What's worse is Zafón's tendency to switch narrator when it fits the story; he stays in first person for most of the book, but at times he cannot figure out a way to develop the backstory and just goes into omniscient third for a few pages until we're up to scratch. It yanks me out of the story, reminds me that it's just a story after all, and I'm not too fond of that.

Maybe that's a little unfair to Zafón; after all, with all the weird coincidences and generally blurred lines between the story itself and the stories within it, we might just have a slightly unreliable narrator here (we'd almost have to, or there would be some things that just don't add up). Maybe the book is (or tries to be) smarter than it looks; maybe I should have kept a cooler head than the weather permits, and not let the Barcelona fog trick me. But for now, it's an enjoyable pageturner, no less, but probably no more.