The angel's game
The Angel's Game is a novel by the Spanish author Carlos Ruiz Zafón , which was first published in Spain in 2008 by Editorial Planeta under the title El juego del ángel .
It was published in German in a translation by Peter Schwaar at Verlag S. Fischer in November 2008 and is the prequel to Zafon's 2001 bestseller Der Schatten des Windes . It is the second part of the four-part series of novels The Cemetery of Forgotten Books .
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Summary
As a minor, David Martín got a job with a modest newspaper after his father was murdered. He has a strong ambition to become a writer, for which he undoubtedly has great talent. When his boss discovers this, he assigns him the back of the paper so he can write a crime-sequel story, The Secrets of Barcelona . One day he receives an invitation from a mysterious publisher, Andreas Corelli, to the best brothel in town. The next day he discovers that the brothel has been closed for years. With the help of his friend Pedro Vidal, the son of a wealthy businessman, he leaves the newspaper to become a professional writer at the Barrido and Escobillas publishing house . There he wrote a series of serial novels under the pseudonym Ignatius B. Samson with the title The City of the Damned . For years Martín worked nonstop and without regard to his health before he decided to take six months off to publish a novel under his real name. He also uses the time to rewrite the book of his friend Vidal together with his secret love Cristina Sagnier, who has so far tried unsuccessfully to write. During this time David Martín fell seriously ill: a brain tumor in an advanced stage was diagnosed. To his chagrin, David learns that Cristina has married her mutual friend Pedro Vidal out of gratitude. At that moment, the publisher Andreas Corelli suggested that he write a book for him. For this he would pay him generously and enable him to cure his illness. When Martín accepts this, he sets off a series of incidents that change the lives of everyone around him.
Plot in detail
With the mysterious library, the “cemetery of forgotten books” and the bookstore of the Sempere and Sons family in Barcelona, Ruiz Zafón has set out a framework for his novels, from which the stories and fates in the books The Shadow of the Wind and The Angel's Game , The Prisoner of Heaven and The Labyrinth of Lights each develop independently. While the Semperes bookstore is a very real place and one is made familiar with the people from four generations of this family, the "cemetery" library remains shrouded in mystery, it is known and accessible only to a very few initiated (and it is of course a Ruiz invention Zafóns). Fitted into these two locations, in addition to Ruiz Zafón's native city of Barcelona, the restless history of Spain in the first half of the 20th century forms the background of these many interleaved stories, which one can only fully understand after reading all three books - and to that extent The arc of suspense is already directed expectantly towards the fourth volume of the cycle, which has already been announced. The book The Angel's Game is to be understood as a prequel to the shadow of the wind . Ruiz Zafón divided the book into three acts and an epilogue. The Angel's Game begins at the beginning of the 20th century and ends with the epilogue dated 1945. It lets the reader experience parts of the first 45 years in the life of the writer David Martín.
Act 1: The City of the Damned
As a young man, David Martín's father (born 1875) experienced his essential influence in the Spanish war for the Philippines in 1896/97 and learned nothing apart from being a soldier. His mother, a saleswoman, leaves him and David, who was born in 1900, very early, so that the weak child grows up alone with the often grumpy and unemployed father. David learns to read very early and has to hide his love of reading from his poorly literate father. In the Sempere and Sons bookstore, on the other hand, the boy is allowed to read undisturbed, and he soon becomes friends with old Sempere, who often gives him books. The father eventually gets a job as a night watchman in the Voice of Industry newspaper , and little David goes there with him occasionally. He witnessed how one evening in 1908 the father was shot by three men in front of the publishing house and bleeding to death in his arms. This attack is actually aimed at Pedro Vidal, a son from one of the richest families in the city, “star of the newspaper and bosom friend of the publisher”. The events made him feel obliged to look after the young David, and he found him a place to stay and a job as an errand boy for the newspaper.
Ten years later, again benefiting from Vidal, who knows and appreciates the attempts at writing by his friend and protégé, a first story by David appears in the newspaper, which was well received by readers for the emergence of the operetta-like adventure series The Secrets of Barcelona and thus at the beginning of his Writing career leads. The next step in David's professional development was also initiated by Vidal: In 1920 David was hired by a newly founded publishing house to write the novel series The City of the Damned under the pseudonym Ignatius B. Samson . To do this, he has to produce 200 typewriter pages per month and is contractually bound to this publisher for several years. Financially now adequately equipped, he rents a long vacant house, which has attracted him for years with its tower-like structure.
Already after the first episodes of the series The Secrets of Barcelona in 1917, David received a letter from an unknown Parisian publisher Andreas Corelli, who praised his work and his talent and gave him pleasure and surprise with an invitation to a noble brothel called Träumerei want. David reluctantly accepts the invitation and experiences fairy tales that night, with the description of which Ruiz Zafón only makes the beginning of the wondrous and sometimes mysterious aspects in this book that allow him to invent unexpected twists and turns. You can also see echoes or echoes of his earlier horror novels with which Ruiz Zafón not only succeeds in building, maintaining and resolving long arcs of tension, but also challenging the reader's imagination and giving him scope for his own interpretations.
For several years David worked incessantly, with great tension but also success for his new publisher, on the pocket novel series The City of the Damned . During this time he occasionally and only by chance meets Cristina Sagnier, the daughter of Pedro Vidal's chauffeur, and falls in love with her. One day, Cristina, who now works as Vidal's secretary, asks David to improve Vidal's writing because he has long been trying in vain to write a great and important novel. David is only too happy to agree, and now they have been meeting regularly at David's apartment for some time without Vidal's knowledge. The result is that he is practically rewriting Vidal's book, the plan and layout of which, by the way, David once proposed to Vidal years ago. David now works all the time, sleeps far too little and pokes himself up with coffee and cigarettes until he collapses on the street. He is taken to a homeless shelter by the water reservoir, where he meets Andreas Corelli ten years after his first letter. He made him the offer that David should work exclusively for him for a year and promised a princely reward. With reference to his current contract, David refuses. When visiting the doctor because of the breakdown, a brain tumor is found with only a short-term chance of survival. At his insistence, his two publishers are now allowing David a nine-month release from his contractual obligation so that he can finally finish his novel The Steps of Heaven for publication under his own name. The publishing house promises to go to print.
Cristina accompanies her father to a sanatorium in the mountains that Vidal pays. After a few weeks the father dies there. When they return, David can pick them up from the train station; they stay together in his apartment for a full night of love. A short time later, the two books by Vidal (title Das Aschenhaus ) and by David are published at the same time . Vidal's book is highly praised by unjust criticism, while David's work is dismissed by the press as a bumbling beginner's work. Only old Sempere praises it as one of the best books he has ever sold. He asks David to dedicate his copy, which he puts in the display case with the first editions that are not for sale.
At a dinner with Vidal to celebrate the publication of her books, David learns two devastating pieces of news from Vidal: Cristina has accepted Vidal's marriage proposal and the attack on David's father years ago was actually against Vidal. Last blow of the day for David: he has to watch his mother throw the copy of his book that he had brought to her into a wastebasket in the street. He can save it and, with the help of old Sempere, store it in the library of forgotten books . There he takes - similar to Daniel Sempere's later in the shadow of the wind - a fateful book, namely a leather-bound machine manuscript with the title Lux Aeterna and the initials DM (like his own) as the only indication of authorship. When he returned home, he found another invitation from Corelli.
The contract with the patron Andreas Corelli
David meets Corelli ("the patron") in an old villa that he has rented, about a year after their first meeting at the water reservoir (1929). Corelli repeats and clarifies his offer: For a year David should work exclusively for him on a pamphlet on the establishment of a religion, “write a story for which people would live and die, for which they would kill and accept their own death for which they would sacrifice and condemn and exhale their soul… ”. As wages he is offered the enormous sum of 100,000 francs, the money is in a box. It was only when Corelli promised to get rid of his brain tumor and thus permanent health that David overcame his great concerns and accepted. That night he stays in Corelli's house and in a dream experiences the healing operation in the cellar of the house. He wakes up at noon the next day and leaves the lonely house with the money in the best possible condition.
Act 2: Lux Aeterna
As with this miraculous healing, Ruiz Zafón pushes the narrative forward by depicting many mysterious events. The game of the angel seems to the reader more and more than the game of the devil, but the author leaves it with a few references to Corelli in this regard. The most obvious are Corelli's not getting older, which David notices when looking at old photos, as well as his sentence when talking to David about their fathers: "Mine rejected me for reasons that are irrelevant and rejected me from home" (p. 124), which makes us think of the fallen angel Lucifer. The silver brooch that Corelli wears on the lapel of his exquisitely cut dark suits points in the same direction: it depicts an angel with outspread wings; and when he says to David's question about the location of their next meeting: "God only knows" and Ruiz Zafón writes: "He licked his lips as if it seemed to him to be a delicious joke" (p. 282) a Mephistophelian figure before him.
First of all, David's publishers were killed in a fire at the publishing house, which dissolved his contract and freed him to work in Corelli's service. Then, when looking through the Lux Aeterna manuscript taken from the secret library, he discovers that it must have been written on the same typewriter that he had taken over when he rented his apartment in the house with the tower. The table of contents given (on p. 235) presents it as a kind of book of the dead with a “refined mixture of different ideas of paradise and hell”; the author with the initials DM - like David himself - seems to have fallen into a madness from which he himself seeks in vain to liberate.
With the introduction of the young girl Isabella, who is forced on him by Sempere as a student and secretary, there is a lively, fresh element in David's life that David only slowly and reluctantly accepts. On the basis of the rejection of this intruder on his part and youthful rebellion on her part, her dialogues sparkle with humor and finally recognition and affection and make the corresponding passages a great pleasure to read. In a previously locked room in the apartment, Isabella discovers old letters with the name Diego Marlasca, DM, while cleaning up - the same initials as on the manuscript Lux Aeterna . To David's horror, there is also a photo, among others, in which the actress Irene Sabino, who was famous years ago, can be seen in a company, among which Corelli can be seen in the background. Another photo with Sabino Dame was apparently taken in David's tower room.
David is now researching religious topics in the relevant libraries in Barcelona, thinking about the structure of his work for Corelli and reporting to him every few weeks, who controls the progress of the work, praises and gives advice. But David begins next to it and increasingly intensively researching the history of his house with the tower. Diego Marlasca, whose name appeared on letters from Irene Sabino, had been a lawyer in a college until 1902, to which father and son Valera belonged. Marlasca died in 1904 soon after buying the house. From Valera's son David learns about Marlasca's theological and religious-historical interests and writings, while Marlasca's widow tells him about his participation in the meetings of a spiritualistic group through which he hoped to come into contact with his son Ishmael, who drowned as a child; Irene Sabino was also involved. The year before his death he was working on a contract for a Parisian publisher, but after the divorce he buried himself completely in his house with the tower and felt obsessed with something. Since David feels the same, this information creates increasing fears in him, reinforced by suspicious details about Corelli's Paris publisher Editions de la Lumière . The antiquarian friend Gustavo Barceló had found out the following while researching in Paris: The publishing house was founded in Paris in 1881, but had already closed in 1914, although Corelli was only about 50 years old, he had settled in southern France, but was up soon afterwards died from a snakebite.
In the archive of the newspaper Vanguardia , David finds various obituaries for Marlasca from 1904, which depict the cause of death as an accident, namely that he drowned in the water reservoir. However, he hears from the former police officer Salvador, who had worked on the case at the time, that the truth is that Marlasca was set on fire and thrown dead into the water. Shortly before, he had withdrawn 100,000 francs from a bank, which had disappeared, presumably with a Jaco who had belonged to the spiritualists. Damian Roures, the other leader of the spiritualistic circle, confirms that Marlasca had felt possessed and hoped to get his son Ishmael back through spiritualistic powers. Now there are two murders: Roures and the widow Marlasca are found dead, and David is linked to both cases by the police inspector Grandes because he had been with them shortly before.
3rd act: The Angel's Game
The death of old Sempere (around 1930) also finds its place in this increasingly complicated crime story. He suffered a fatal heart attack in an argument with a customer to whom he did not want to sell the book she wanted. It was the book The Steps of Heaven, which David had dedicated to him ; the customer was the actress Irene Sabino. David feels complicit in the death of his fatherly friend Sempere because of his book. But the news of Cristina's disappearance hits him even more. After her husband Pedro Vidal separated from her just a few months after they were married, she disappeared from Barcelona. The family, the police and now David are looking for them in vain. But then David suspects her to be at her father's grave and he drives to the spa town in the Pyrenees, where he was buried months earlier. He finds her there in a sanatorium in complete mental confusion. When she was found hypothermic on her father's grave, she stated that something or someone had run into her. David experiences her increasing mental confusion and cannot prevent her drowning in the ice-cold lake of the health resort.
Back in Barcelona, he finds the angel brooch that Corelli always wore on his lapel in the chest in which he kept the almost finished manuscript of his work for Corelli, which Cristina had wanted to read on her last visit there. This makes it clear to David that Cristina was threatened by him when she tried to burn the devil's manuscript. Hateful, David goes into the house where he met Corelli to conclude a contract, only to terminate his contract in a short process: he shoots his father's gun in the head and chest of the patron Corelli, who is sitting there in the semi-darkness - but instead of blood trickles in fine powder like an hourglass from the doll's body with a painted wooden head. David realizes that he has fallen for Corelli's diabolical deception.
The other events on the last hundred pages of the book are almost overturning and not all storylines are brought to the last clarity (e.g. when Marlasca killed Salvador). The next victim after Roures, the widow Marlasca and after Cristina's drowning in the lake, the lawyer Valera is found dead in his apartment.
It is becoming increasingly clear to David that alongside the diabolical Corelli as a human figure, Diego Marlasca, who actually perished in 1904, must be an actor in the increasingly cruel game. Since he felt guilty for the death of his son Ismael (around 1902), Marlasca became more and more entangled in spiritualistic rescue fantasies, which had been fanned and reinforced by the unscrupulous and greedy organizers of the Jaco and Roures meetings with Irene Sabino as bait. A “witch of Somorrostro” introduced Marlasca to the old fishing legend that by sacrificing a pure soul, his own soul could be cleansed of its guilt and saved. It seems to David that Marlasca chose him as a victim, who is working on a Lux Aeterna font as his successor in his former apartment and, just as he is now in the diabolical service for Corelli .
David is strengthened in this view by the discovery of a tomb with his name on the large figure of an angel and the years 1900–1930. He concludes that Marlasca is now planning his, David's death, because he fears David's discovery. Marlasca, who allegedly died in 1904, had only faked his death; the cremated corpse was the spiritualist Jaco. At the time, it was the police officer Salvador who was about to expose this fraud. He was therefore killed by Marlasca and the body was hidden in the chamber behind a cabinet in his house with the tower. Marlasca could pass himself off to David as Salvador until he noticed when looking at old photos that Marlasca had not aged in the last 20 years, just like Corelli, whom David had recognized in old photos as he looked today.
David is arrested while the police are investigating the various murders. He now reports his version of all recent events to Inspector Grandes and protests his innocence. Difficult to understand for the reader is the result of the examination of all his statements by Grandes, who recognizes only a "microscopic" grain of truth as proven fact of all the details admitted by David: in Irene Sabino's room, Grandes saw David's book The Steps of Heaven that she had stolen from the Sempere bookstore and caused old Sempere's death in an argument with him. The old bookseller was of the opinion that something of the author's soul was contained in their books and he suspected that Irene could harm David's soul. Because of this one point of truth, but also because Pedro Vidal considered him innocent and had asked for his release, Grandes releases David - but only in appearance, because his two henchmen Marcos and Castelo follow him on his way to Irene Sabino. David finds Irene dying, poisoned, and just learns from her that the missing spiritualist Jaco lies in Marlasca's grave and he can take the book that caused Sempere to die with him.
Injured, he escapes the two police officers who are chasing him, who themselves are killed in the process, and flees to Pedro Vidal, from whom he hopes for help. There he receives medical care and as a consolation tells Vidal a fictional story about Cristina, who went into hiding in Paris and was waiting for David there, but still loved Vidal, whom David would never be able to replace. Vidal has already prepared David's escape across the sea - his last good deed for Martín; because he shoots himself out of sorrow. While leaving the Vidal house, David is pursued by Grandes, but is able to escape him by pushing him out of the gondola of the cable car crossing the harbor bay. Now he rushes to his apartment to solve the riddle in the room behind the cupboard. In it he finds the tied up mummy of the real Salvador, which Marlasca hid there years ago. As the last act of the murder stories in the book, Marlasca appears to kill David. During the fight, Marlasca is lit by the burning oil lamp, David escapes from the house that burns down. He brings the book that Irene had stolen back to the Sempere bookshop and, as a farewell, introduces Isabella to the secret library. There he places his manuscript Lux Aeterna with the other Lux Aeterna volumes and realizes that they are all just variations on the same theme of a Satan religion, the game of the fallen angel Lucifer.
The epilogue
This is dated to 1945. David was on the run for many years and bought a cabin by the sea a year earlier to start writing again. Since then he has written his whole story. He wrote to the Sempere bookstore in Barcelona and received a reply from Sempere junior. enclosed with a letter from Isabella, which she wrote as a precautionary measure before her death. In 1935 she had Sempere jun. married, their son Daniel was born in 1936, the main character in the first volume of the cycle. She herself died of cholera in 1940, details can be found in volume three of the cycle. The mysterious ending allows the patron Corelli to appear again, who leads Martín by the hand to the child Cristina, just as it was pasted as a photo in her father's album. He speaks:
“I have decided to give you back what you loved most and what I took from you. I have decided that you will take my place once and feel what I feel, that you will not get a day older and that you will see Cristina grow up, that you will fall in love with her again, that she will grow older by your side and one day in your arms see dying. This is my blessing and my revenge. "
If one sees the mysterious stories that David Martín claims to have experienced in Barcelona in the years before 1930, in the light of the testimony of Fermín's fellow inmate, Dr. Sanahuja (see Volume 3: The Prisoner of Heaven ), Martín had evidently already been schizophrenic before his escape in 1930 and imprisonment in 1939, so most of the things told in the angel's play could be seen as a description of delusions. It will be interesting to see how Ruiz Zafón continues this story in the fourth volume and whether he gives hints in this direction or leaves an assessment to the reader's imagination.
swell
literature
- Carlos Ruiz Zafón: The Angel's Game. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-10-095400-8 . (At number 1 on the Spiegel bestseller list for 2 weeks in 2008 )
- Carlos Ruiz Zafón: El juego del ángel. Editorial Planeta, Barcelona 2008, ISBN 978-84-08-08118-0 .
- S. Burger, N. Geel, A. Schwarz: With Carlos Ruiz Zafón through Barcelona. A travel guide (= Suhrkamp Taschenbuch 3856). 3. Edition. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 2012, ISBN 978-3-518-45856-3 (With articles by Zafon on buildings, squares and streets of his books as well as details from his youth in the city).
Web links
- http://www.eljuegodelangel.com/ (span.)