The Sophomore

I have made no secret of absolutely LOVING Carlos Ruiz Zafon's first novel Shadow of the Wind. I wrote about it in a previous post. One of the highlights of my reading summer was the release of Zafon's second novel The Angel's Game. I bought it the day after it came out, in hardcover. I rarely buy hardcover.

I will confess that I was trying to temper my excitement as this is a second novel and just like in music, the sophomore effort can sometimes be a little disappointing. Especially when it has to live up to something that is as good as the first book.

Stuck on a Desert Island

When I am stuck for something to read, I go back to the classics. In the airport (en route to either Turin or Madrid - I can't remember which) stuck for something to read, I spotted Wuthering Heights and thought “YES!” Beside it was Jane Eyre which I had never read and thought “Perfect, not only can I go back to an old faithful but I can still read something sort of new!”    


I was quite pleased.

There is something to be said for going back and re-reading favourite books from time to time. I firmly believe that as you read them, at different ages and different times of your life, they take on new meanings. With Wuthering Heights I had always romanticized Heathcliff and Cathy as having one of the truly great love affairs. Clearly I had a romance filter firmly in place in my teenage years to think that their dark, insane and completely dysfunctional relationship was anything remotely close to a classic romance. That doesn’t make the story any less of a masterpiece; it just made me think it over again.   I love that experience. Jane Eyre - nothing short of brilliant. I have read critical opinion that it is a perfect novel. I think I have to agree: character development, plot construction, description...all exquisite. I could read it over and over again. 

I then started to think about all of the other books I could read over and over again. Which then led me to think about a game my husband and I play “If you were stuck on a desert island” – best played over a bottle of wine and nice dinner after the children go to bed. We usually play this about music (“If you could only have 5 albums on a desert island – what would they be – no greatest hits”). So I started thinking about books. If I was stuck on a desert island today and could only have 10 books, here is what they would be (in no particular order):

Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Pride & Prejudice, Jane Austen
Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruis Zafon
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
The World According to Garp, John Irvin

I suspect this list will be pretty fluid although I bet at least half will remain the same as time goes by.

Why I Read

I was complaining in an earlier post that I have been on a run of mediocre books.  Some have been okay but nothing has really knocked my socks off.  Sometimes when I get into a reading rut, I just give it a break and go to magazines and the like.

However, once in a while, you get a book that reminds you why novels are so fantastic. The classics, Marquez, have all been those testaments for me as to the sheer joy of reading. I have come across another one; I recently read The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon.

Where do I start? It is incredibly rich, layered, wonderfully constructed. I was involved and getting pleasure from this book from the very first chapter. What is wonderfully appropriate is that the whole story revolves around a boy’s passion for a novel by a little known writer. In the mysterious Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a father and son bonded by books and literature, embark on the father's version of a rite of passage. His father tells his son to go and explore this mysterious and exciting place where one does not choose a book but rather, the book chooses the person, becoming a part of him. From here, The Shadow of the Wind unfolds and twists and turns through parallel story lines that are easily intertwined and completely captivating. It also doesn’t hurt that the story takes place in Barcelona, one of my favourite cities in the world.

There is a lot going on this book: romance, mystery, intrigue, comedy, tragedy. It is complex and unpredictable but surprisingly easy to follow and engaging. This is actually a translation and judging how beautifully written it is in English, I can’t even imagine what it would be like to read it in its original Spanish. I’m not going to attempt to describe the plot in more detail because I could never do it justice. I think I will echo the endorsement that Stephen King gave The Shadow of the Wind: “One gorgeous read”.

The Shadow of the Wind
By Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Knopf Publishing Group/Penguin