I’m a bit late coming to this one. It’s been around a while, and most voracious readers probably encountered it long ago. But on the off chance that some of you have not yet discovered Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind, I urge you to track it down today.
I honestly can’t say enough good things about this novel, but let me try to at least say a few:
The Shadow of the Wind is a long, dark, densely-plotted, sometimes horrific, often thrilling, frequently humorous and overall enchanting treasure house of a novel. It’s a love letter to books and literature, writing, thinking, and ultimately, a love letter to love itself. It is overstuffed with both high ideas and gothic cliches, and seems written with the belief that a plot twist is no good unless it leads to at least a dozen more. It’s a reminder of why we read, why we write, why we crave stories in our lives … and a reminder that a good novel should be like life itself, not a rocket ride on a straight line, designed to get us from A to Z as quickly as possible, but a winding, mysterious journey.
It’s impossible to summarize this book without A) giving too much away, B) ruining the fun, or C) sounding utterly ridiculous. But I can tell you that The Shadow of the Wind is filled with dark mysteries, baffling quests, tense pursuits, great heroes, terrific villains, doomed romances, and even a genuinely creepy “haunted house.” Above all, it has plot to spare, and Zafon spins it all out like a master.
