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Hans Otterson's Reviews > The Shadow of the Wind
The Shadow of the Wind (The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, #1)
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I hardly know what to make of this book. It's certainly entertaining, and full of atmosphere and twists and turns, but it lacks heart and characters to care about. The central mystery surrounds a writer whose life we gradually come to know in its details, but who remains a cipher that's difficult to sympathize with. Why do so many people care about Julian Carax? Why do so many women inexplicably fall in love with him when his only character traits seem to be "mopey", "good at writing", and "emotionally stunted"?
The story is more or less a mystery, but instead of a gradually-revealed tapestry we get the main character simply downloading infodumps from people he meets. This is never more egregious than in the last fourth of the novel, when the backstory that the main character has been searching for for the entire novel is just...revealed to him in a hundred-page letter from a dead character.
All the potentially interesting drama just seems crowded out by exposition. As the book went along, there was a subtle rise in tension between the main character and his father, but it's simply never explored, let alone resolved. In many ways I think this would have been a much better story if it were not about someone in the future discovering the story of Julian Carax, but simply us discovering the story of Julian Carax as he lives it. Why the framing story of Daniel at all? You can say it rhymes with the Carax story, but any rhyming is naked convenience on the part of the writer.
And why the framing device of the "cemetery of forgotten books", a place that I guess is...real? Fantasical? Magical-realist (to use that lazy appellation slapped on Spanish-language stories with magical elements)? The entire novel is strictly historical fiction excepting this one fantastical device that kicks off the whole thing. Why is it there? What does it mean to the world of the story? Really, it could be removed and Daniel could find the novel that kicks off the plot in another way, and the story would remain wholly unchanged. So it bears no meaning.
About 2/3 of the way through the book, the protagonist, from his future-omniscient voice, tells us that IN SEVEN DAYS SOMETHING BIG IS GOING TO HAPPEN (yes, a chapter ends like that, with bolded, capitalized text separated from the rest of the text to tell us this, beating us over the head instead of subtly and quietly placing it like a bomb). As ham-fistedly as this is handled in the text, the revelation that this "something" (I'm leaving out what it is so as to avoid spoilers; to be clear the book tells us exactly what is going to happen) will occur piqued my interest and gave a charge to the next section of the book. Then, we're detoured by that letter I mentioned above, which turns out to be a sort of brilliant device, because due to the detour, once we get to the "something", we've entirely forgotten it's going to happen. So we get a nice "oh shit!" moment.
...except it's a fucking cheat. The "something" is very clearly a consequential event in the main character's life, by the very definition of what it is. But it turns out that it is only "something" by a very technical definition, and the consequential nature of that something is not in effect due to the fact that it's only "something" technically, but not actually. I hope this makes some sense to those who haven't read it. The point is: The something that is stated as GOING TO HAPPEN IN SEVEN DAYS, doesn't really happen. It's a bullshit trick that an author can pull once, and after that I will never trust him again.
Whoo, went on a bit of a rant there. I suppose I did because it's not as if the book's horrible; there is so much promise, and such a sweeping vision of murder and love in Civil War Spain. But it ends up as a lesser effort for so many reasons.
KnP
EDIT: Oh also! Near the beginning of the book you meet a VERY MYSTERIOUS character, whose identity you of course are trying to guess, but you lop the first guess that occurs to you off the top, because of course that'd be too obvious. Nope. Turns out at the end, the first, obvious guess was correct.
The story is more or less a mystery, but instead of a gradually-revealed tapestry we get the main character simply downloading infodumps from people he meets. This is never more egregious than in the last fourth of the novel, when the backstory that the main character has been searching for for the entire novel is just...revealed to him in a hundred-page letter from a dead character.
All the potentially interesting drama just seems crowded out by exposition. As the book went along, there was a subtle rise in tension between the main character and his father, but it's simply never explored, let alone resolved. In many ways I think this would have been a much better story if it were not about someone in the future discovering the story of Julian Carax, but simply us discovering the story of Julian Carax as he lives it. Why the framing story of Daniel at all? You can say it rhymes with the Carax story, but any rhyming is naked convenience on the part of the writer.
And why the framing device of the "cemetery of forgotten books", a place that I guess is...real? Fantasical? Magical-realist (to use that lazy appellation slapped on Spanish-language stories with magical elements)? The entire novel is strictly historical fiction excepting this one fantastical device that kicks off the whole thing. Why is it there? What does it mean to the world of the story? Really, it could be removed and Daniel could find the novel that kicks off the plot in another way, and the story would remain wholly unchanged. So it bears no meaning.
About 2/3 of the way through the book, the protagonist, from his future-omniscient voice, tells us that IN SEVEN DAYS SOMETHING BIG IS GOING TO HAPPEN (yes, a chapter ends like that, with bolded, capitalized text separated from the rest of the text to tell us this, beating us over the head instead of subtly and quietly placing it like a bomb). As ham-fistedly as this is handled in the text, the revelation that this "something" (I'm leaving out what it is so as to avoid spoilers; to be clear the book tells us exactly what is going to happen) will occur piqued my interest and gave a charge to the next section of the book. Then, we're detoured by that letter I mentioned above, which turns out to be a sort of brilliant device, because due to the detour, once we get to the "something", we've entirely forgotten it's going to happen. So we get a nice "oh shit!" moment.
...except it's a fucking cheat. The "something" is very clearly a consequential event in the main character's life, by the very definition of what it is. But it turns out that it is only "something" by a very technical definition, and the consequential nature of that something is not in effect due to the fact that it's only "something" technically, but not actually. I hope this makes some sense to those who haven't read it. The point is: The something that is stated as GOING TO HAPPEN IN SEVEN DAYS, doesn't really happen. It's a bullshit trick that an author can pull once, and after that I will never trust him again.
Whoo, went on a bit of a rant there. I suppose I did because it's not as if the book's horrible; there is so much promise, and such a sweeping vision of murder and love in Civil War Spain. But it ends up as a lesser effort for so many reasons.
KnP
EDIT: Oh also! Near the beginning of the book you meet a VERY MYSTERIOUS character, whose identity you of course are trying to guess, but you lop the first guess that occurs to you off the top, because of course that'd be too obvious. Nope. Turns out at the end, the first, obvious guess was correct.
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Reading Progress
April 10, 2022
–
Started Reading
April 10, 2022
– Shelved
April 19, 2022
–
Finished Reading
