Contributor biographical information http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0721/2003062376-b.html
Publisher description http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0721/2003062376-d.html
Available:*
Material Type | Library | Call Number | Item Barcode | Location |
---|---|---|---|---|
Book | Searching... Newbury Town Library | RUI | 32127001129736 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Amesbury Public Library | FIC RUIZ ZAFON | 32114002697796 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Andover - Memorial Hall Library | FICTION RUIZ ZAFÓN | 31330009331301 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Boxford Town Library | MYS RUIZ ZAFON | 32115002028270 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Carlisle - Gleason Public Library | F RUIZ ZAFON | 32117000765440 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Chelmsford Public Library | FIC/RUIZ ZAFON | 31480011604615 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Georgetown Peabody Library | FIC ZAFON (PB) | 32120000629574 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Groton Public Library | FIC RUIZ ZAFON | 37003700734867 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Groveland - Langley-Adams Library | FIC RUIZ ZAFON | 32121000270815 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Hamilton-Wenham Public Library | FIC RUIZ ZAFON | 30470001707487 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Lawrence Public Library | E READER RUI | 31549004509195 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Manchester-by-the-Sea Public Library | PB/FIC | 32124001785237 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Middleton - Flint Public Library | F RUIZ ZAFON | 32126001592893 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... North Andover - Stevens Memorial Library | F RUIZ ZAFON | 31478002900737 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... North Reading - Flint Memorial Library | FIC RUI | 31550001880753 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Rockport Public Library | FIC RUIZ ZAFON | 32129002169505 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Rowley Public Library | FIC RUI | 32130000438314 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Salisbury Public Library | FIC ZAFON | 32131000445804 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Tewksbury Public Library | FICTION RUIZ ZAFON | 32132002726464 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Topsfield Town Library | FIC RUIZ ZAFON | 32133002507474 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... West Newbury - G.A.R. Memorial Library | F RUI | 32135000992269 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Westford - J.V. Fletcher Library | F RUIZ ZAFON | 31990004305012 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Wilmington Memorial Library | FICTION RUIZ ZAFON, CARLOS | 32136002120529 | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
"Anyone who enjoys novels that are scary, erotic, touching, tragic and thrilling should rush right out to the nearest bookstore and pick up The Shadow of the Wind . Really, you should." --Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
"Wondrous...masterful... The Shadow of the Wind is ultimately a love letter to literature, intended for readers as passionate about storytelling as its young hero." -- Entertainment Weekly, Editor's Choice
"This is one gorgeous read." --Stephen King
"I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetary of Forgotten Books for the first time..."
Barcelona, 1945: A city slowly heals in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and Daniel, an antiquarian book dealer's son who mourns the loss of his mother, finds solace in a mysterious book entitled The Shadow of the Wind , by one Julián Carax. But when he sets out to find the author's other works, he makes a shocking discovery: someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book Carax has written. In fact, Daniel may have the last of Carax's books in existence. Soon Daniel's seemingly innocent quest opens a door into one of Barcelona's darkest secrets--an epic story of murder, madness, and doomed love.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Ruiz Zafon's novel, a bestseller in his native Spain, takes the satanic touches from Angel Heart and stirs them into a bookish intrigue ? la Foucault's Pendulum. The time is the 1950s; the place, Barcelona. Daniel Sempere, the son of a widowed bookstore owner, is 10 when he discovers a novel, The Shadow of the Wind, by Juli n Carax. The novel is rare, the author obscure, and rumors tell of a horribly disfigured man who has been burning every copy he can find of Carax's novels. The man calls himself Lain Coubert-the name of the devil in one of Carax's novels. As he grows up, Daniel's fascination with the mysterious Carax links him to a blind femme fatale with a "porcelain gaze," Clara Barcelo; another fan, a leftist jack-of-all-trades, Fermin Romero de Torres; his best friend's sister, the delectable Beatriz Aguilar; and, as he begins investigating the life and death of Carax, a cast of characters with secrets to hide. Officially, Carax's dead body was dumped in an alley in 1936. But discrepancies in this story surface. Meanwhile, Daniel and Fermin are being harried by a sadistic policeman, Carax's childhood friend. As Daniel's quest continues, frightening parallels between his own life and Carax's begin to emerge. Ruiz Zafon strives for a literary tone, and no scene goes by without its complement of florid, cute and inexact similes and metaphors (snow is "God's dandruff"; servants obey orders with "the efficiency and submissiveness of a body of well-trained insects"). Yet the colorful cast of characters, the gothic turns and the straining for effect only give the book the feel of para-literature or the Hollywood version of a great 19th-century novel. (Apr. 12) Forecast: Appealing packaging (a weathered, antique-look jacket), prepublication bookseller events and an eight-city author tour should give this an early boost, though momentum may flag down the stretch. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Call it the "book book" genre: this international sensation (it has sold in more than 20 countries and been number one on the Spanish best-seller list), newly translated into English, has books and storytelling--and a single, physical book--at its heart. In post-World War II Barcelona, young Daniel is taken by his bookseller father to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a massive sanctuary where books are guarded from oblivion. Told to choose one book to protect, he selects The Shadow of the Wind0 , byulian Carax. He reads it, loves it, and soon learns it is both very valuable and very much in danger because someone is determinedly burning every copy of every book written by the obscure Carax. To call this book--Zafon's Shadow of the Wind--0 old-fashioned is to mean it in the best way. It's big, chock-full of unusual characters, and strong in its sense of place. Daniel's initiation into the mysteries of adulthood is given the same weight as the mystery of the book-burner. And the setting--Spain under Franco--injects an air of sobriety into some plot elements that might otherwise seem soap operatic. Part detective story, part boy's adventure, part romance, fantasy, and gothic horror, the intricate plot is urged on by extravagant foreshadowing and nail-nibbling tension. This is rich, lavish storytelling, very much in the tradition of Rossing's Ex Libris 0 (2001). --Keir Graff Copyright 2004 Booklist
Guardian Review
In an age of unrelenting austerity, any touch of luxury can stir the soul; a brandname has a poetry all its own. And when a society is, like Franco's Spain, imprisoned in stultifying economic and imaginative autarchy, any hint of imported glamour represents an escape. Hence the care invested by a character in The Shadow of the Wind in his choice of taxi for a trip across town: "He wanted to get into a Studebaker at the very least." The 1940s Barcelona of Carlos Ruiz Zafon's new novel is by no means the trendy tourist destination of today; rather, it's a city shut down for the duration in death and fear. Its buildings pockmarked by gunfire or abandoned by bankrupt dynasties, it is a place in material and metaphorical ruins. Survivors of civil war, its people hang on grimly, with no apparent expectation of better times. Stalked by secret police, with only a kitsch and collaborationist Catholicism for spiritual comfort, they lead lives of unrelieved monotony and hardship. Yet such people will snatch at scraps - and, as Zafon shows, find real sustenance in a city streetscape whose every corner tells a story. Many of its secrets may be sinister, but we have a sense too of a realm of mystery the regime can't reach, a place in which a taxi ride can become a romantic quest. Narrator Daniel Sempere is seeking some conclusion to the story of 30s novelist Julian Carax, a "remarkably unsuccessful" writer whose book The Shadow of the Wind has taken a hold over his life. The son of a secondhand bookseller, Daniel found this volume in the city's "Cemetery of Forgotten Books", a labyrinthine library in the oldest part of town in which the works of authors immortal yet unread are assembled in their thousands. It seemed to call to him from the shelf, and when he read it, it took possession of him; yet this novel has a history as well as a plot. It is not merely neglected, it turns out: a menacing and faceless figure has been implacably hunting down every available copy and burning it - that individual, it becomes clear, is now hunting Daniel too. His situation, Daniel sees, bears uncanny resemblances to that of the protagonist in The Shadow of the Wind , but it's to Carax's biography that he'll have to turn if he's to find his pursuer's motive. The more he finds out about his subject, the more he learns of lives affected (or more often afflicted) by their contact with the writer, burned by the artist's all-consuming egotism. Just to make things more complicated - and a great deal darker - Daniel finds his researches have attracted the interest of the thuggish and vindictive city police chief, Ignacio Fumero. Novels constructed like Russian dolls, stories within stories, with terraced layers of surveillance and interpretation embedded in texts which advertise their own artificiality: this is the standard stuff of doctrinaire postmodernism. That this elaborate nest of narratives stacks together so neatly is impressive; that the cogs which drive the action whir quite so swiftly and smoothly is little short of miraculous. Zafon's real virtues are more old-fashioned ones, though: what makes this novel so irresistibly readable is the emotional energy generated by the ups and downs of a big and varied cast of memorable characters. Daniel's ingenuous ardour makes him the perfect narrator for a journey of discovery; his friend Fermin is an engagingly eccentric guide to the secret history of his beloved Barcelona. The ancestral tribulations of Carax's adoptive Aldaya family are genuinely heartrending, for all their gothic extrava gance; the menace of Fumero transcends his unmistakable aura of grand guignol. In short, all the characters live. Literary ingenuity isn't something Zafon wants to indulge in for its own sake; neither are his efforts geared towards some wholesale deconstruction of "reality". The undoubted flaws in The Shadow of the Wind do, ironically, stem from an overvaluing of words at the expense of things. A trivial yet revealing mannerism is the frequency with which a character reads some book or other deep into the night, enthralled, only for the sun to come up on cue as the last page is reached: the whole universe, it seems, is at the service of the act of reading. More problematic is a tendency to daub on description without too much thought for either precision or consistency. Scarcely have we been told that the early-morning city is awakening "like a watercolour slowly coming to life" than we're being conducted via "a vault of blue haze" and then a narrow alley that is "more of a scar than a street" to "what seemed the carcass of a palace". From painting through architecture to anatomy in a matter of moments: so rich a metaphor mix may be heady stuff line by line, but its effect is fairly quickly to befuddle the reader. The habit of allusiveness also inclines Zafon towards indulgence in his attitude to cliche: there are too many enigmatic smiles and impenetrable gazes here by half. Overall, however, he does not come across as a writer wrapped up in literary theory: his conviction of the importance of literature in real life comes shining through. If the career of Julian Carax illustrates the destructive effects of the artistic personality, his story exemplifies, too, the liberating power of the imagination. Walk down any street in Zafon's Barcelona and you'll glimpse the shades of the past and the secrets of the present, inscribed alike in the city's material fabric and the lives of its citizens. Exuberant, larger than life in their tragedies as in their joys and desires, they are irrepressible: no dictatorship can keep them down. Michael Kerrigan's Voices from the Trail: The Lewis and Clark Expedition is published by Saraband this autumn.To order The Shadow of the Wind for pounds 10.99 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Caption: article-zafon.1 Narrator Daniel Sempere is seeking some conclusion to the story of 30s novelist Julian Carax, a "remarkably unsuccessful" writer whose book The Shadow of the Wind has taken a hold over his life. The son of a secondhand bookseller, Daniel found this volume in the city's "Cemetery of Forgotten Books", a labyrinthine library in the oldest part of town in which the works of authors immortal yet unread are assembled in their thousands. It seemed to call to him from the shelf, and when he read it, it took possession of him; yet this novel has a history as well as a plot. It is not merely neglected, it turns out: a menacing and faceless figure has been implacably hunting down every available copy and burning it - that individual, it becomes clear, is now hunting Daniel too. His situation, Daniel sees, bears uncanny resemblances to that of the protagonist in The Shadow of the Wind , but it's to Carax's biography that he'll have to turn if he's to find his pursuer's motive. The more he finds out about his subject, the more he learns of lives affected (or more often afflicted) by their contact with the writer, burned by the artist's all-consuming egotism. Just to make things more complicated - and a great deal darker - Daniel finds his researches have attracted the interest of the thuggish and vindictive city police chief, Ignacio Fumero.
Kirkus Review
The histories of a mysterious book and its enigmatic author are painstakingly disentangled in this yeasty Dickensian romance: a first novel by a Spanish novelist now living in the US. We meet its engaging narrator Daniel Sempere in 1945, when he's an 11-year-old boy brought by his father, a Barcelona rare-book dealer, to a secret library known as the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. Enthralled, Daniel "chooses" an obscure novel, The Shadow of the Wind, a complex quest tale whose author, Julian Carax, reputedly fled Spain at the outbreak of its Civil War, and later died in Paris. Carax and his book obsess Daniel for a decade, as he grows to manhood, falls in and out of fascination, if not love with three beguiling women, and comes ever closer to understanding who Carax was and how he was connected to the family of tyrannical Don Ricardo Aldaya--and why a sinister, "faceless" stranger who identifies himself as Carax's fictional creation ("demonic") "Lain Coubert" has seemingly "got out of the pages of a book so that he could burn it." Daniel's investigations are aided, and sometimes impeded, by a lively gallery of vividly evoked supporting characters. Prominent among them are secretive translator Nuria Monfort (who knows more about Carax's Paris years than she initially reveals); Aldaya family maid Jacinta Coronada, consigned to a lunatic asylum to conceal what she knows; Daniel's ebullient Sancho Panza Fermin Romero de Torres, a wily vagrant working as "bibliographic detective" in the Semperes' bookstore; and vengeful police inspector Fumero, a Javert-like stalker whose refusal to believe Carax is dead precipitates the climax--at which Daniel realizes he's much more than just a reader of Carax's intricate, sorrowful story. The Shadow of the Wind will keep you up nights--and it'll be time well spent. Absolutely marvelous. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
This complex, Byzantine, at times longwinded work, which spent more than 60 weeks on Spain's best sellers list, throws together mystery, romance, and crime into one big mix like an olla podrida. Set in Franco's Spain, it revolves around the remarkably sophisticated 18-year-old Daniel Sempere. After visiting the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, which recalls Borges's labyrinthine Library of Babel, he decides to entrust to his care a tome by Julian Carax called The Shadow of the Wind. He soon discovers not only that he probably has the last extant copy of this work but that someone wants desperately to eradicate all the author's books and will resort to any means necessary, including murder. Daniel meets a wide range of well-developed yet eccentric characters as he wanders throughout Barcelona attempting to ascertain the truth. Zafon's fifth novel follows a traditional narrative; what is outstanding is the metaphysical concept of books that assume a life of their own as the author subtly plays with intertextual references (e.g., a pair of cockatoos named Ortega and Gasset make cameo appearances). Even the plot and characters of Carax's fictitious work are interwoven into this meticulously crafted mosaic. Recommended primarily for public libraries and especially for readers who lead double lives as bibliophiles. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/03.]-Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC Lib., Dublin, OH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.