Why (re)read “The Shadow of the Wind” by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The shadow of the wind is mostly invisible, to see it you need particular, almost unique conditions. It is an inconsistent, uncontrollable, difficult to reproduce phenomenon. A case, even if the case, for Carlos Ruiz Zafon, it doesn’t really exist; it would perhaps speak of destiny, a destiny to go and seek just like that invisible shadow that hides from anyone.

The shadow of the wind (Mondadori, translated by Lia Sezzi), a novel published for the first time in Italy in 2004, is all this: a invisible story, because lost in time, elusive, because its story fades into the readers’ memory and turns into memory. It is also unique because it represents a editorial case capable of making its author the second most read Spanish writer in the world after Miguel de Cervantes.

Twenty years after its publication in Italy, this novel continues to fascinate generations of readers, confirming itself perhaps as one of the last stories whose echo continues to resonate in bookstores with a universal language. To date, only in Italy, The shadow of the wind it has sold more than two and a half million copies. It has been translated into more than 1000 titles around the world 34 languages.

One night Daniel, the protagonist of Zafón’s longseller, wakes up with a start and he can no longer remember his mother’s face. She has forgotten him, she believes she has lost him forever, because Isabella died years before, when he was just a child.

The story of Daniel Sempere and his bookshop comes to life between the streets of one Smoky Barcelona, with dim light. The specter of the civil war and Francoism hover over the shoulders of the protagonists without ever stealing the scene. The weight of the past, in Zafón’s Barcelona, ​​never obscures the need for the present, but is an integral part of it.

They are mainly the women, and then men create the spiral into which, word after word, the author makes us fall. The mystery of Cemetery of Forgotten Booksthe curse of a lost book, a writer who tried to erase all his traces. And then love, a love that condemns forever, but which is the only way to truly know life.

Daniel takes a wide tour, through the stories of strangers who become good friends. He grows up to understand that there is nothing that can truly be learned: rather, everything is remembered. It is only by reaching that point that he finally regains possession of his mother’s face.

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Carlos Ruiz Zaforn (Getty photo)

Carlos Ruiz Zafón, in his best-known work, does nothing but return to that face. Isabella, Daniel’s mother, is the pivotal figure of the four novels mentioned The shadow of the wind represents, only by release date, the first port. It is a story that becomes a world, page after page, and can be retraced in different ways, as the author himself wanted. A unique Barcelona that can only be accessed through his words.

The Angel’s Game, The Prisoner of Heaven and The Labyrinth of Spirits sThere are different entrances to go through to enjoy different views. There is no reading orderyou can choose the chronological one or the exit one, but there is no right or wrong way to access that world. It is a story made of memory because it adds, word after word, a fragment of memory, a new tile with a geometric rose on which to take one’s steps.

Zafón passed away in 2020 at just 55 years old, but his death did not affect the charm of his stories for all those readers who have always been nourished by his words.

It is not uncommon to walk around today’s Barcelona and come across tourists looking on the streets or in the shops for those places that, in the pages of The shadow of the wind, they have become familiar. Many will have traveled the city in search of the bookshelf Sempere and childrenor the most mysterious Cemetery of Forgotten Books.

And it is precisely in the memory of that Barcelona that overlaps with the real city that the power of Zafòn’s pen lives again, capable of building invisible places and playing with lights to give us the possibility of distinguishing, albeit fleetingly, the precious shadow of the wind: the past that becomes the present, before escaping into a nostalgic memory.

“We exist as long as we are remembered.”

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