The shadow of the wind
The Shadow of the Wind is a novel by the Spanish author Carlos Ruiz Zafón (1964–2020). It was first published in German in 2001 in Spanish under the title La sombra del viento and in 2003 by Insel Verlag in a translation by Peter Schwaar . For two weeks in 2003, it was number 1 on the Spiegel bestseller list . The novel has been translated into 36 languages and sold around ten million times.
The plot focuses on Daniel Sempere's youth and early adulthood in Barcelona ( Catalonia , Spain ) from 1945 to 1966. In 1945, Daniel, the son of a bookseller, comes across a book that fascinates him and, strangely enough, its almost unknown author about the he first conducts occasional and then increasingly systematic inquiries.
In the life story of the author, Julián Carax, gradually uncovered by Daniel, moral decay and unpunished crimes from the period around 1920 are combined with the crimes of the Spanish civil war after 1936 and the Franco dictatorship after 1945. These shadows accompany and dominate the Protagonists across the generations - until they actively deal with them.
action
The following summary of the storylines does not follow the nested composition, but describes the storyline, concerning the individual people, largely chronologically.
The young Daniel Sempere from Barcelona is led by his father, a bookseller, to a hidden library, the "Cemetery of Forgotten Books". He gets to choose a book and chooses the novel The Shadow of the Wind by the unknown author Julián Carax. Ruiz Zafón's novel of the same name tells of the life of this author, of how his novel came about and of Daniel's search for the solution of the riddle.
Daniel learns from the bookseller Gustavo Barceló that all copies of the book except this one have been burned. Daniel meets Barceló's blind niece Clara, with whom he falls in love and to whom he gives the book. Soon afterwards he is asked about the book by a strange, hooded stranger. Thereupon Daniel wants to get the book back from Clara, but catches her naked with her piano teacher, who beats up the boy and throws him out of the house.
In front of the house he meets Fermín Romero de Torres, a former secret service worker who lives on the street and is surprisingly educated and eloquent. His potential is discovered by Daniel, after which he is employed by Daniel's father in the bookstore to track down rare books. He also becomes Daniel's friend and helps him with his research on the author Julián Carax. It turns out that Fermín is wanted by Francisco Javier Fumero, an opportunistic and brutal police inspector, who also murdered Clara Barceló's father during the civil war.
A few years later, in 1954, Daniel sees Beatrice again, the sister of his best friend Tomás Aguilar. Despite their engagement to a lieutenant, they meet and fall in love. Beatriz supports him with details from Julián Carax's life and both finally find the crypt with the grave of Julián Carax's adolescent lover Penélope Aldaya and their stillborn child David in the abandoned villa of the former industrialist family Aldaya. Decades before, Penélope had bled to death after the birth of her son because her father did not allow her to receive medical care in order to conceal the multiple scandal: Penélope was only seventeen years old, not married and the half-sister of her lover.
Julián's mother, Sophie Carax, had come to Barcelona from Paris when she was nineteen. She met Don Ricardo Aldaya, with whom she began an affair and from whom she eventually became pregnant. Against his will, she wanted to keep the child, and she married the hatter Antoni Fortuny, who had long been courting her. After all, Ricardo Aldaya takes care of his illegitimate son Julian and pays him a place in the renowned San Gabriel School. Julián, who doesn't know that Don Ricardo is his father, befriends his son Jorge and meets Penélope, Jorge's sister - and his half-sister. Penélope and Julián feel made for each other and fall in love - haunted by the hatred and jealousy of Javier Fumero. As the son of the caretaker, Javier Fumero is teased and beaten up by the privileged and elite students of the San Gabriel School. A group of students around Julian Carax, on the other hand, did not adopt the class consciousness of that time and accepted Javier Fumero amicably.
The love between Julián and Penélope is discovered by their mother and the planned escape to Paris is thwarted when Penélope is locked in her room by her raging father and left to be forgotten. Julian escapes alone and only finds out much later that she did not stay behind voluntarily and that they had a child together. In Paris, Julián Carax begins to write novels that are published, although they repeatedly turn out to be slow-moving: Miquel Moliner, a friend and rich legacy from their school days, secretly pays the printing costs. At the end of 1935, the novel The Shadow of the Wind was published.
Years after her death, Jorge Aldaya, Penélope's brother, plans to kill Julián in a duel with his former classmate and now influential and bloodthirsty police officer Javier Fumero. But Jorge dies of his own pistol manipulated by Fumero, and Julian, hoping to see Penélope again, travels to Barcelona, where Fumero is already waiting for him.
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Julian meets his seriously ill friend Miquel Moliner again in Barcelona, who is shot in his place by Fumero's agents. On the trail of the Aldayas, Julián finds the graves of Penélope and David in their family's long-abandoned property. He blames himself for the death of his lover and her child and decides to wipe out his existence and her literary traces. He sets his publisher's book store on fire, but his attempted suicide fails and he survives completely disfigured with severe burns. After a long period of relaxation, he begins to burn his novels under the name "Laín Coubert", a character from his novel The Shadow of the Wind , where he can get hold of them. Nuria Montfort, who cares for him, thwarts his self-erasure by hiding a copy of every novel in the “Cemetery of Forgotten Books” - Daniel discovered one of them years later.
The love between Daniel and Beatriz is also discovered like that between Julian and Penélope. Beatriz escapes from her parents 'house and hides in the Aldayas' villa, which has long been abandoned and vacant, where she meets Julian Carax. Daniel, who is looking for Beatrice in the Aldaya villa, unintentionally leads Inspector Fumero to Julián Carax. Fumero wants to shoot Julian, but thanks to Daniel's help and the hesitant intervention of a Fumero employee, Julian Carax finally kills him.
Despite the serious gunshot wound, Daniel survived and eventually marries Beatrice. They have a son whom they call Julian. Ten years later, Daniel receives a manuscript dedicated to him and Beatrice - Julián Carax has started to write again and Barceló, the bookseller, founds a publishing house that wants to publish Carax's works - the beginnings of new stories.
Composition and Interpretation
The story of Daniel Semperes is an upper text from which almost regularly and always extensive secondary characters tell from a time (around 1914–1935) before Daniel's birth. In "his" sections, Daniel, as the narrator, tells Daniel with irony and self-irony, with metaphors and stuff mata close to the experience, while in the historical digressions (more than a third of the novel and the last one hundred printed pages!) A fact-based representation of the Secondary narrator dominates. These provide the facets for the background of the events until the main character is told and are stylistically largely uniform. The facts, which are accessible bit by bit, are based on the model of Eduardo Mendoza's La verdad sobre el caso Savolta (1975) as if in a detective novel and only reveal the explanation for the entanglements when viewed from the end of the novel.
This double structure of the upper text and numerous excursions is mystically linked by a texture of analogous events: similarities in the biographies of Daniel and Julián, which are about forty years apart, the similarities in character between Julián and Daniel, Julián and Clara’s search for their fathers, the Appearance of the devil who destroys books, the boyfriendship that ends with love for the friend's sister, first sexual experiences and the catastrophe of their discovery and the detour, but no longer accidental, transition from Julián's pen to Daniel.
The impression of an astonishing repetition of the events is reinforced by the incidentally interspersed predetermination of the protagonists: Daniel has the certainty that the book that set the events in motion “has been waiting for me for years, probably since the time before I was born . ”Daniel's friend Beatriz also says:“ I think nothing happens by chance. Basically everything has its secret plan, even if we don't understand it. ”And Jacinta, the Aldaya's nanny, says:“ Nobody had noticed, but as always, the decisive factor was already decided before the story even began. ”
This texture of analogies , identities and fatalism gives the impression of an overwhelming power of fate in a male-dominated society, which even after forty years can still force the protagonists to repeat the story. The compulsion to repeat is only ended at the end by a coalition of the brave who together cause the death of the hangman and the marriage of the lovers: a non-terrorist police officer, a forgiving father, a persecuted and self-persecuting author, an eloquent secret service agent and The lovers who trust in their future come together to confront crime and the politics of forgetting, thereby breaking the continuum of repetitions.
In The Shadow of the Wind, Zafón tells “a story of lonely people, of absences and loss”, as Daniel once put it: the absence and loss of a mountain of culture in the “cemetery of the forgotten books”, the absence and loss of Daniel's mother, of Claras Father, of friends and loved ones. The power of shared memory and the tenacity from which it thrives are therefore the main themes of the novel. The Shadow of the Wind is a historical novel belonging to the genre of historiographical metafiction .
Historical context
The novel is part of the Spanish memory debate . When an unwritten law of secrecy about one's own past prevailed in culture during the Transición in the 1980s , many artists expressed their criticism of Franco's military dictatorship hidden through fictional-historical novels that contained elements of the detective novel. Although a socially realistic style of memory issues in literature became important in the 1990s, the writing culture of the 1980s revived at the beginning of the new millennium. Ruiz Zafón's La sombra del viento can also be classified here. At the beginning of the 2000s, some events, such as the trial of the Chilean ex-dictatorship Augusto Pinochet , the efforts to exhumate Federico García Lorca from a mass grave or the public confrontation with the ETA , stimulated the debate about the Spanish past again. They led to the Ley de Memoria Histórica passed in 2007 , a law that recognizes the victims of the Francoist tyranny and publicly names the dictatorship as such.
In addition to the named victims, the novel also mentions the innumerable nameless people who disappeared during the civil war and during the decades-long revenge of the victorious Franquism . This terror and its politics of oblivion continue to shape the life of the characters in the novel. This is where the earlier authoritarian conservatism of the Spanish bourgeoisie and the later Francoist terrorism meet: the violence is personified both in the hypocritical patriarch Aldaya and in Javier Fumero, an agile killer and executioner of the Franco dictatorship. About forty years after Julian's and Penelope's birth, Daniel begins his research - about forty years (from 1936 to 1977) the civil war and Franco's dictatorship prevented the reconstruction of the lives of the disappeared.
Most of the characters in the novel are critical of the regime. Fermín, for example, the former Republican secret service employee, or Nuria, who describes her own past in the civil war as an opposition activist. In the entire novel there are minor characters who position themselves politically left. Only Fumero and his helpers and the father of Daniel's lover Beatriz Aguilar are portrayed as loyal to the regime. The novel is anti-Francoist. The contrast between good and evil is a central theme in it.
Against the background of this greatest devastation of Spanish society in its entire history up to now, the novel can also be read as an encouragement to illuminate the fate of these hundreds of thousands as well as that of the few protagonists at the center of the novel: “It's like the tides, know It ", it says at one point in the novel," the barbarism [...] withdraws and you think you have saved yourself, but it always comes back. "The compulsion to repeat this story only begins to end when the protagonists turn to it.
Awards
Zafóns novel was 2004 at the ZDF series Our best ranked 16th of the favorite books of the German selected. A year later, the English-language translation won the Barry Award for best first novel in the USA .
Sequels
The novel is designed as the first part of a 4-part series. The sequel novel The Game of the Angels (El juego del ángel), which tells the prehistory of The Shadow of the Wind , was published in April 2008 in Spain and in November 2008 in German translation by S. Fischer . The third volume, El prisionero del cielo, was published in Spain in 2011 and as a German edition in October 2012 under the title Der Gefangene des Himmels also by S. Fischer. The final volume El laberinto de los espίritus was published in 2016 in the original Spanish and under the title The Labyrinth of Lights 2017 in German translation.
expenditure
- Carlos Ruiz Zafón: The shadow of the wind. Novel . Suhrkamp, Frankfurt / M. 2005, ISBN 3-518-45800-0
- Carlos Ruiz Zafón: The shadow of the wind. Radio play . The Hörverlag, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-89940-745-8 (2 CDs)
- Carlos Ruiz Zafón: The shadow of the wind. Audio book . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2004, ISBN 3-455-30362-5 (7 CDs, abridged version)
- Carlos Ruiz Zafón: La sombra del viento . Planeta, Barcelona 2005, ISBN 84-08-04364-1
literature
- Karsten Kruschel : The shadow of the wind . In: The Science Fiction Year 2004 , ed. by Sascha Mamczak and Wolfgang Jeschke , Wilhelm Heyne Verlag Munich 2004, ISBN 3-453-87896-5 , pp. 933-936.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Brief presentation of the book In: eliceo.com (spa.). Retrieved April 24, 2011.
- ^ Sara J. Brenneis, Dictatorship noir. Post-war spanish history in Carlos Ruiz Zafón's La Sombra del Viento . In: Romance Studies , 26, 1, January 2008, pp. 61–73, here p. 63.
- ^ Ellis, Robert Richmond, Reading the Spanish Past. Library Fantasies in Carlos Ruiz Zafón's La Sombra del Viento . In: Bulletin of Spanish Studies , 83, 6, 2006, pp. 839-854, here p. 839.
- ^ Sara J. Brenneis, Dictatorship noir. Post-war spanish history in Carlos Ruiz Zafón's La Sombra del Viento . In: Romance Studies , 26, 1, January 2008, pp. 61–73, here pp. 63–64.
- ^ Sara J. Brenneis, Dictatorship noir. Post-war spanish history in Carlos Ruiz Zafón's La Sombra del Viento . In: Romance Studies , 26, 1, January 2008, pp. 61–73, here p. 67.
- ↑ http://www.carlosruizzafon.com/
- ↑ El juego del ángel. Retrieved November 20, 2011 (Spanish).
- ^ Carlos Ruiz Zafón - Competition for a new novel. Retrieved April 20, 2011 .
- ^ El prisionero del cielo. Retrieved November 20, 2011 (Spanish).