A father’s gift to his motherless son was to visit the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. The boy could select a single book to protect. The choice could have killed the little man. It certainly cursed him. For he chose The Shadow of the Wind[1] and after reading it in one night, hard times got worse. Someone was destroying every word ever written by the author, and the author had vanished.

“I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot.” (Daniel Sempere, as a boy)

The hunt for this missing writer and his books consumed all the years of Daniel’s youth. People burned in the heat of pursuit. Some burned in body, some in spirit. They burned in darkness and the burning brought more darkness. They danced in a fearful embrace. A dirge marked the aftermath of war. Slow chords strained through cavernous ravines of the city, Barcelona. From the bay, up alleys to dark mansions and through cathedral halls, and in the brothels, the bookstores and asylums. The notes of conflict rang out long and low beneath clouds that were the bad result of war—Civil War. Its ending punctuation was dictatorship in the particular style of fascism. The clouds would not leave. But they could be made to rain.

This is a book within a book. Also a story within infinite books. It is a raging tale—impossible to contain within a library or a bookstore or a cemetery. A generation cannot contain it, let alone pairs and triangles of lovers or feuding, traumatized children that grow up in a fight to the death.

If you don’t read this book, you will not escape it. The author is a magician with mythical powers, an artist transfused by the blood of the masters—he is Freudian and Machiavellian, saintly and mean. His characters are you and me—at our best and at our worst.

More words from the voice of the brave book finder, Daniel Sempere, now older:

“Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it’s an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.”

I recommend you to read with your heart and mind The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón.


Image: A library book now living in the Barcelona of my heart and mind—for Peace. (Cover design and illustration by Tal Gorestsky)

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1232.The_Shadow_of_the_Wind