carlos ruiz zafón the cemetery of forgotten books

And The Shadow of the Wind, which would sell 15m copies worldwide, somehow achieved all of these.įor Spain, the four books dramatise the lingering shadow of the Spanish civil war and the dictatorship of General Franco. Sudden unexpected literary sensations usually result from two things: luck – a prominent review, urgent word-of-mouth, celebrity endorsement – and chiming with the times. Also featuring David Martín, a fictional writer of violent thrillers, the quartet is a quest in which writers, readers, collectors and librarians joust to reveal or conceal key texts. Ruiz Zafón layered his stories like Matryoshka dolls: the final volume, The Labyrinth of Spirits, shares its name with a fictional series of children’s books that are suffering censorship in fascist Spain. The Shadow of the Wind introduces Daniel Sempere, the son of a librarian there, who, in the early 1930s, picks up a novel by an obscure author called Julián Carax, titled The Shadow of the Wind. This cemetery is a labyrinthine private library in Barcelona that archives texts threatened with theft or destruction. Ruiz Zafón gave the tetralogy the umbrella title The Cemetery of Forgotten Books. It is some consolation that he had completed the defining project of his career, which ran to 2,250 pages and occupied him for two decades: The Shadow of the Wind (2001, translated in 2004) and its three sequels The Angel’s Game (2009), The Prisoner of Heaven (2013) and The Labyrinth of the Spirits (2018). The fact that Ruiz Zafón wrote like one of the ancients makes it even more shocking that he has died at the age of 55.

Carlos ruiz zafón the cemetery of forgotten books