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The Shadow of the Wind
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The Shadow of the Wind (2001) (edit title/settings)

by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (Author) (edit contributors)

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Description edit see section history

Barcelona, 1945 -- just after the war, a great world city lies in shadow, nursing its wounds, and a boy named Daniel awakes on his eleventh birthday to find that he can no longer remember his mother's face. To console his only child, Daniel's widowed father, an antiquarian book dealer,... read more

Summary edit see section history

Barcelona, 1945—A great world city lies shrouded in secrets after the war, and a boy mourning the loss of his mother finds solace in his love for an extraordinary book called The Shadow of the Wind, by an author named Julian Carax. When the boy searches for Carax’s other books, it begins to... read more (warning: may contain spoilers)

Barcelona, 1945—A great world city lies shrouded in secrets after the war, and a boy mourning the loss of his mother finds solace in his love for an extraordinary book called The Shadow of the Wind, by an author named Julian Carax. When the boy searches for Carax’s other books, it begins to dawn on him, to his horror, that someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book the man has ever written. Soon the boy realizes that The Shadow of the Wind is as dangerous to own as it is impossible to forget, for the mystery of its author’s identity holds the key to an epic story of murder, madness, and doomed love that someone will go to any lengths to keep secret.

___Beschrijving Bol.com___
In het oude centrum van Barcelona ligt het Kerkhof der Vergeten Boeken. Hoofdpersoon Daniel Sempere wordt door zijn vader, weduwnaar en boekhandelaar, meegenomen naar deze geheimzinnige, verborgen wereld van verhalen. Vanaf dat moment neemt Daniels leven een wending die hij niet had kunnen voorzien. Hij mag een boek uitzoeken en kiest De schaduw van de wind, geschreven door een zekere Julián Carax. Het boek laat hem niet meer los, ook al schudt de wereld tijdens het grauwe Franco-regime om hem heen op zijn grondvesten. Hij wil alles weten over het boek en de schrijver. En merkwaardigerwijs lijken alle mensen die hij ontmoet, ook de vrouwen op wie hij verliefd wordt, deel uit te maken van het grote spel waarvan het boek het middelpunt vormt.

In the old center of Barcelona is the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. Protagonist Daniel Sempere by his father, widower and bookseller, taken to the mysterious, hidden world of stories. From that moment life takes a turn Daniels he could not have foreseen. He can pick and choose a book, The Shadow of the Wind, written by a certain Julián Carax. The book would not let him loose, even shakes the world during the Franco regime gray around him to its foundations. He wants to know everything about the book and the author. And curiously, seem all people he meets, the women with whom he falls in love, part of the great struggle which the book is the center.


___NBD|Biblion recensie___
Als een boekverkoper zijn tienjarige zoon meeneemt naar het paleisachtige, geheimzinnige Kerkhof der Vergeten Boeken, raakt Daniel betoverd door De schaduw van de wind. Hij neemt zich voor achter de identiteit van de schrijver Julian Carax te komen. Sterker nog: hij lijkt het leven van deze mysterieuze man te gaan leven. Tegen de achtergrond van het Barcelona van de Burgeroorlog en Franco ontrolt zich een fascinerend verhaal, of feitelijk vele verhalen over figuren die zich in de nabijheid van Carax ophielden en mensen rondom Daniel. De structuur van het verhaal is als een Russische pop, die eindeloos veel kleinere poppen in zich heeft verstopt. Carlos Ruiz Zafon (1964) heeft een fantasierijke, knappe roman geschreven vol avontuur, spanning, en liefde, die je in een adem uitleest. Zijn taalgebruik is prachtig, zijn belezenheid groot en de vertaling is vloeiend. Velen zullen van deze onderhoudende, intelligente roman genieten. Ruime bladspiegel en normale druk.

(Biblion recensie, Drs. Fieke Nugteren) VN Detective & Thrillergids
Typisch zo'n boek dat niet in één keer uit hoeft, maar dat je soms even neerlegt om er glimlachend over na te denken. Het basisgegeven is de droom van iedere lezer: een vader neemt zijn zoon mee naar het kerkhof der Vergeten Boeken. Daar mag de jonge Daniel Sempere één boek uitkiezen. Het wordt De schaduw van de wind van ene Julián Carax. De jongen verliest zich helemaal in het boek en onderneemt uit pure bewondering een zoektocht naar de schrijver ervan. Er wordt in dit boek gezocht, gevonden, gevochten, geschoten, gehuild, gelachen, bemind en natuurlijk gelezen. Dat alles vertelt Ruiz Zafón onderkoeld, maar betrokken en vol mededogen. Prachtig.

Characters edit see section history

  • Daniel Sempere: The main character. He helps his father in their bookshop Sempere and Son. He is taken to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books where he discovers a novel by Julian Carax.
  • Fermin Romero de Torres: A colorful and witty beggar Daniel meets in the streets of Barcelona. He is hired to work at Sempere and Son. He is one of the best Characters and adds a bit of comedy to the story.
  • Julian Carax: The mysterious author of "The Shadow of the Wind" and "The Red House."
  • Isaac Monfort: Keeper of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books
  • Nuria Monfort: A woman who worked for the firm that published Julian Carax's books. Translator.
  • Miquel Moliner: Former friend of Julian Carax.
  • Lain Coubert: A character straight out of the "The Shadow of the Wind," said to be the Devil. The man burning all Carax's books also goes by this name.
  • Penelope Aldaya: Friend of Julian Carax, sister to Jorge Aldaya and daughter of Ricardo Aldaya.
  • Gustavo Barcelo: A well off book seller who Daniel goes to for advice. He once bargained to buy "The Shadow of the Wind" from him. Uncle of Clara.
  • Jorge Aldaya: Brother of Penelope Aldaya and former best friend of Julian Carax.
  • Inspector Fumero: A ruthless police inspector, and Fermin's alleged nemesis.
  • Ricardo Aldaya: Father to Jorge and Penelope Aldaya. Takes an interest in Julian Carax's future.
  • Fernando Ramos: Catholic Priest whom Daniel visits.
  • Clara Barcelo: Gustavo Barcelo's beautiful, blind niece and Daniel's first love.
  • Tomas Aguilar: A "gentle giant" and Daniel's best friend from childhood. An engineer at heart.
  • Beatriz Aguilar: Sister of Tomas, Daniel's best friend.
Show all 16 characters
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Quotes edit see section history

  • “This is a world of shadows, Daniel, and magic is a rare asset.”
    Clara
  • “Here, have a Sugus candy, they cure everything.”
    Fermin
  • “The day I die, all that was once mine will be yours...Except my dreams”
    Miquel Moliner
  • “Julian was not a man. He was an illness”
  • “Carax was a robber of hearts, and he took my daughters to the grave, or to hell”
    Isaac
  • “There are no second chances in life, except to feel remorse.”
    Nuria Monfort
  • “Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.”
    Julian Carax
  • “People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living weren’t already complicated enough.”
    Issac
  • “Here, have a Sugus candy, they cure everything.”
    Fermin Romero de Torres
  • ““Making money isn’t hard in itself,” he complained. “What’s hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one’s life to.””
  • “Fools talk, cowards are silent, wise men listen.”
  • “Life has enough torturers as it is, without you going around moonlighting as a Grand Inquisitor against yourself.”
  • “In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams.”
    Daniel Sempere
  • “Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day. - p.484”
    Daniel Sempere
  • “Julian once wrote that coincidences are the scars of fate. There are no coincidences, Daniel. We are puppets of our subconscious desires.”
    Fermin
  • “Every book, every volume that you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it.”
  • ““I don’t know. People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living weren’t already complicated enough.”
    Isaac
  • ““Television, my dear Daniel, is the Antichrist, and I can assure you that after only three or four generations, people will no longer even know how to fart on their own and humans will return to living in caves, to medieval savagery, and to the general state of imbecility that slugs overcame back in the Pleistocene era. Our world will not die as a result of the bomb, as the papers say, it will die of laughter, of banality, of making a joke of everything and a lousy joke at that.””
    Fermin Romero de Torres
  • ““In this manner, secretly, the Fortuny family let the years go by, silencing their hearts and their souls to the point where, from so much keeping quiet, , they forgot the words with which to express their real feelings and became strangers living under the same roof, like so many other families in the vast city.”
    Mr Molins
  • “I got the feeling that Julian was living in the past, locked in his memories. Julian lived within himself, for his books and inside them—a comfortable prison of his own design.”
    Mr. Cabestany
  • “He sculpted his sentences neatly, measuring them out with a cadence that seemed to promise and ultimate moral that never emerged. Years of teaching had left him with that firm and didactic tone of someone used to being heard, but not certain of being listened to.”
    Julian about Father Fernando
  • “Like all old cities, Barcelona is a sum of its ruins. The great glories so many people are proud of—palaces, factories and monuments, the emblems with which we identify—are nothing more than relics of an extinguished civilization.”
    Father Fernando
  • ““Daniel, the father-son relationship is based on thousands of little white lies. Presents from the Three Kings, the tooth fairy, meritocracy and many others. This is just one more. Don’ feel guilty.””
    Fermin
  • “Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it.”
    Fermin
  • “People talk too much. Humans aren't decended from monekys. They come from parrots.”
    Senor Molins
  • “I had arranged to meet Bea at five in the university cloister, and, to my dismay, the day was turning out to be longer than The Brothers Karamazov.”
    Daniel Sempere
  • “Why are books burned? Through stupidity, ignorance, hatred... goodness only knows.”
    Nuria Monfort
  • “He used to say that we exist as long as somebody remembers us.”
    Nuria Monfort
  • “A good father?Yes. Like yours. A man with a head, a heart, and a soul. A man capable of listening, of leading and respecting a child, and not drowning his own defects in him. Someone a child will not only love becasue he's his father but will also admire for the person he is. Someone he would want to grow up to resemble.”
    Fermin
  • “The most efficient way of rendering the poor harmless is to teach them to want to imitate the rich”
    Fermin
  • “Years of teaching had left him with that firm and didactic tone of someone used to being heard, but not certain of being listened to.”
    Daniel Sempere
  • “Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a theif; a hooker; or a lottery vendor: its three most commonpersonifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it yourself.”
    Fermin
  • “May we assume the owl got the pussycat to go out to sea with him?”
  • “When we stand in fromt of a coffin, we see only what is good, or what we want to see.”
  • “As I walked in the darkness through the tunnels and tunnels of books, I could not help being overcome by a sense of sadness. I couldn't help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever. I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot.”
    Daniel Sempere
  • “Then, please sire, could you get to the friggin point? Because with all this metaphorical spin and flourish, I'm beginning to feel a fiery bowel movement at the gates."”
    Fermin
  • “Blasphemer. You ought to have your soul cleaned out with hydrochloric acid.”
    Merceditas
  • “People who have no life always have to stick their nose in the life of others."”
    Fermin
  • “destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it."”
    Fermin
  • “she would swear like a trooper but she smelled like a fairy-tale princess"”
    Fermin
  • “Don't worry Fermin. Besides, there's probably no treatment capable of crushing your procreative powers.”
    Daniel
  • “About accursed books, about the man who wrote them, about a character who broke out of the pages of a novel so that he could burn it, about a betrayal and a lost friendship. It's a story of love, of hatred, and of the dreams that live in the shadow of the wind.”
    Daniel
  • “"You remind me of julian before he lost his faith.""His faith in what?"In everything."”
    Nuria Monfort and Daniel
  • “What a great quote Don Gustavo. Do you mind if I add it to my repertoire?”
    Fermin
  • “Three heads think better than two, especially if the third one is mine.”
    Gustavo Barcelo
  • “You can come out. There's nothing to worry about, Daniel. Despite all my evil doings, I still can't see you.”
    Clara
  • “There are worse prisons the words”
    Fermin
  • “The words with which a child's heart is poisoned, through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory and sooner or later they burn his soul.n”
    Nuria Monfort
  • “"What the world needs is more thoroughly evil people and fewer boarderline pigheads.””
    Fermin- pg 156
  • “"Tell Fumero, from Carax, that I remember his little sailor suit."”
    Miquel
  • “Every book, every volume you see here has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. <...>When a library disappears, or a bookshop closes down, when a book is consigned to oblivion, those of us who know this place, its guardians, make sure that it gets here. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader's hands. In the shop we buy and sell them but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody's best friend. Now they only have us.”
    Daniel's father
  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • “Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you,”
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  • One of the pitfalls of childhood is that one doesn’t have to understand something to feel it. By the time the mind is able to comprehend what has happened, the wounds of the heart are already too deep.
    Highlighted by 377 Kindle customers
  • The words with which a child’s heart is poisoned, through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later they burn his soul.”
    Highlighted by 372 Kindle customers
  • Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it.”
    Highlighted by 342 Kindle customers
  • “Probably because a stranger sees us the way we are, not as he wishes to think we are.”
    Highlighted by 283 Kindle customers
  • “While you’re working, you don’t have to look life in the eye.”
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  • “Presents are made for the pleasure of who gives them, not for the merits of who receives them,”
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  • Sometimes we think people are like lottery tickets, that they’re there to make our most absurd dreams come true.”
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  • Money is like any other virus: once it has rotted the soul of the person who houses it, it sets off in search of new blood.
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  • Julián had once told me that a story is a letter the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.
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Show all 61 quotes from this book

Setting & Locations edit see section history

First Sentence edit see section history

I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.

Table of Contents edit see section history

The Cemetery of Forgotten Books
Days of Ashes 1945-1949 (Chapters 1-13)
City of Shadows 1954 (Chapters 1-44)
Nuria Monfort: Remembrance of the Lost 1933-1955 (Chapters 1-13)
The Shadow of the Wind 1955 (Chapters 1-4)
Postmortem 27 November 1955
The Waters of March 1956
Dramatis Personae 1966

Glossary edit see section history

  • Loquacious: Talking or tending to talk much or freely; talkative; chattering; a loquacious dinner guest.
  • Furtive: Taken, done, used, etc., surreptitiously or by stealth; secret: a furtive glance.
  • Solomonic: Wise or reasonable in character: a Solomonic decision
  • Effusive: Unduly demonstrative; lacking reserve: effusive greetings; an effusive person.
  • Beatific: Bestowing bliss, blessings, happiness, or the like: beatific peace.
  • Surreptious: Obtained, done, made, etc., by stealth; secret or unauthorized: a surreptitious glance.

Series & Lists edit see section history

This is book 56 of 95 in Telegraph Top 100 Books, 2008. (authoritative list)

Preceded by A Suitable Boy, and followed by A Tale of Two Cities.

This is book 71 of 99 in NPR's Top 100 Killer Thriller. (community list)

Preceded by What the Dead Know, and followed by The Cabinet of Curiosities.

This is book 88 of 100 in 100 mejores novelas en español. (community list)

Preceded by Rosario Tijeras, and followed by Camino de perdición.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Carlos Ruiz Zafón (Author)

Other Contributors:

  1. Lucia Graves (Translator) - Translated into English from the original Spanish
  2. Kai Aareleid (Translator)
  3. Silvana Roglić (Translator) - Croatian

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: Spanish
Publisher: Planeta
Country: Spain
Publication Date: 2001
ISBN: 84-08-05793-6
Page Count: 565

Awards edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

  • Library of Congress: PQ6668.U49 S6613
  • Dewey: 863.64

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Reading Level: Young Adults

There are some sexual themes and scenes within the novel which may not be appropriate for children. Also the nature of the description of deaths or murders are of a more graphic nature.

More Books Like This edit see section history

   
  • Foucault's Pendulum
  • A Son of the Circus
  • Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
  • The Night Circus
  • Sea Change
  • Winter in Madrid
  • The Spanish Bow
  • One Hundred Years of Solitude
  • The Angel's Game
  • The Prince of Mist
  • The Angel's Game
  • My Name Is Red
  • The American Boy
  • The Sixth Lamentation

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