Jandy’s Anthology

The Shadow of the Wind

by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

selections

from the first few pages, as the narrator prepares to tell us his story:

This is a story about books…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.

the narrator tells his budding girlfriend about the book that has come to mean so much to him:

I told her how until that moment I had not understood that this was a story about lonely people, about absence and loss, and that that was why I had taken refuge in it until it became confused with my own life, like someone who has escaped into the pages of a novel because those whom he needs to love seem nothing more than ghosts inhabiting the mind of a stranger.

Filed under: 20th-century, Spain, fiction on December 20th, 2006