La sombra del viento by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

However, she is several years older and does not reciprocate his feelings. Daniel refuses to sell it, but soon falls in love with Barcelo's blind niece, Clara, and begins to pay frequent visits to read 'The Shadow of the Wind' to her. When word gets around that Daniel possesses the only known copy of 'The Shadow of the Wind,' he receives an inquiry from Gustavo Barcelo, a rare bookseller and expert on Carax who wishes to purchase it. Daniel then sets out to find out what happened to the author and his books. He soon discovers that the book's mysterious author, Carax, has gone missing along with every other copy of 'The Shadow of the Wind' and most of his other works. Daniel quickly reads and falls in love with the story. Daniel is drawn to one called 'The Shadow of the Wind' by Julian Carax and takes it home with him. One day, his father takes him to the Cemetery of Forgotten books - a secret labyrinthine library that houses rare and banned books. The novel opens in the 1940's with the protagonist, Daniel, a boy whose father owns a bookshop in Barcelona. The novel is actually a story within a story.

His third in the series, The Prisoner of Heaven, is the sequel to The Shadow of the Wind. Ruiz Zafón's follow-up, The Angel's Game, is a prequel to The Shadow of the Wind. It is believed to have sold 15 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling books of all time. It was published in the United States by Penguin Books and in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson and Orion Books. The book was translated into English in 2004 by Lucia Graves and sold over a million copies in the UK after already achieving success on mainland Europe, topping the Spanish bestseller lists for weeks. If La sombra del viento is both memory text and gothic text, then there would seem to be an irresolvable tension at the heart of its representations of, and attitudes to, the historical past.The Shadow of the Wind ( Spanish: La sombra del viento) is a 2001 novel by the Spanish writer Carlos Ruiz Zafón and a worldwide bestseller. The task in the gothic text is to attempt to exorcise the past which is omnipresent, rather than to reclaim a buried past through the recuperative gestures of memory. If the memory text focuses upon the need to recover a forgotten or silenced past, the gothic text rather focuses on the continuing presence of that past, on its continuing power and threat. While sharing this concern, however, the gothic and the memory text approach that past in quite distinct ways. Although these two modes may seem to have little in common, there is one important point at which they converge: their concern with the historical past.

Abstract : This article looks at La sombra del viento as a highly self-conscious gothic text in light of the recent critical debate about the novel's contribution to the growing tradition of the 'memory text'.

La sombra del viento by Carlos Ruiz Zafón