As I traveled around Europe in 2006, I kept finding this 1992 book in Spanish in bookstores inside and outside airports. It was displayed prominently in Spain, as it was to be expected, but also in Italy and in Germany. I remember holding it in my hands at the Munich airport and thinking whether I could read it in its original language or if I should look for a translation. As soon as I managed to get an Internet connection, I hit Amazon.com to check if there was a translation to English available. No luck. I really wanted to read more by the author of the incredible The Shadow of the Wind (TSOTW), but I thought that if I could only find these books in Spanish, I wouldn't be able to read them. I am a native Portuguese speaker who manages to have conversation with Spanish speakers efforlessly without ever having formally studied their language. With a little bit of effort, I can understand 95% of written Spanish, but could I read a full novel? What if the audience for this novel was the young-adult public? Back at home in the US, I decided it was worth a try, so I bought the new edition from Amazon.com and threw myself into it, while keeping a little dictionary always at arms length.
The effort was highly rewarded. To give you an idea of how engrossing I found the book, last night I was within about 100 pages of the end, just about where mysteries are unfolding and the reader is being thrown into the climax. I put it down after 20 pages and went to sleep, but 5 hours later, I came to and couldn't stop thinking about the story. So, I just had to give up trying to go back to sleep and get up at 3:30am to finish it.
The storytelling is true to Zafon's skills even if this was his first published novel. That means, it is magical, exciting, and inherently lyric. It's marketed for the young-adult audience, but I believe that its appeal goes far beyond this group.
The story talks about the Carver family, who in the midst of WWII, relocates from the big city to a beach town. The reader is never told in which country this all happens, but all the character names are in English, so perhaps one can draw conclusions from this fact, even if these conclusions don't really matter for the understanding or the appreciation of the plot. The Carvers end up in a mysterious house, which was previously inhabited by a trajedy stricken family. Max, the 13-year old son, and his two sisters, are quickly engulfed by a stream of supernatural events. Voices come out of the closet to haunt his little sister Irina, who had brought home a sinister cat found wandering the train station. Strange dreams get his older sister Alicia uttely spooked. And Max, in his turn, finds a bizarre garden of statues behind the house, where its stone inhabitants seem to change shape and appear rearranged as time goes on. Behind all this, a Faustian tale awaits to shake up the family and to catapult Max and Alicia in a struggle for their lives. I highly recommend this book and hope that it will end up being translated to different languages as was TSOTW.
Reading this book, one can't fail to see parallels that link it to TSOTW. The mysterious doctor Cain and the burned man in TSOTW seem to have in common their aura of supernatural. I imagine that this has served as a warm-up of sorts where Zafon learned to flex the muscles he put to use to create his masterpiece.
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