Daniel remains besotted with the books of Julián Carax, which sold poorly but somehow continued to be published throughout the 1930’s. Fermín Romero de Torres, who is regularly identified with his full name, is a tremendous enriching character who always has the right thing (or, at least, the most amusing thing) to say. When Daniel is violently booted out of Clara’s life, he stumbles upon the book’s greatest character, Fermín Romero de Torres, a homeless man who comes to work in Daniel’s father’s bookstore. I stopped reading at 100 pages and took a long beak.īut then the story beckoned me back. At this point, I had to wonder where the storyline was attempting to take me, as the characters, while vivid, were not terribly endearing. Daniel reads to Clara and comes up with plenty of reasons to spend time with her over several years. His father, a bookstore owner, introduces him to the larger-than-life Don Gustav Barceló, a book lover and buyer, which leads Daniel into a friendship and long-term crush on Barceló’s niece, Clara, a beautiful blind woman ten years his senior. Young Daniel Sempere finds a book, The Shadow of the Wind by Julián Carax, in a secret bookstore which changes his life. As soon as you begin to read, you get a feeling of darkness, of a life and time where things are tough, and people are simply getting by, the way they know best. The Shadow of the Wind opens in 1945 in Barcelona, a city whose history I know well, and life under the regime of Franco is of particular interest to me. Despite the the fact that the book has been available for several years in English, I only bought the book, along with its companions, The Angel Game and The Prisoner of Heaven, a few months ago. With this number one bestseller, I will admit that I had high hopes when I finally sat down to read this book. What begins as a vase of literary curiosity turns into a race find out the truth behind the life and death of Julián Carax and to save those he left behind. But as Daniel grows up, several people seem inordinately interested in his find. Daniel is allowed to choose one book and from the dusty shelves pulls The Shadow of the Wind by Julián Carax. To this library, a man brings his ten-year-old son, Daniel, one cold morning in 1945. Hidden in the heart of the old city of Barcelona is the ‘Cemetery of Forgotten Books’, a labyrinthine library of obscure and forgotten titles.
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