Hi there!
I have some memories of a book and an author.
Given the number of copies the entire series sold, it is very likely that you have read at least one of the quartet of books from The Shadow of the Wind series. Written by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, the plot in these books traversed the now beaten path of books within books, stories within stories; books as a key to solve a mystery. Very meta. I am no longer a fan of such tools of plot.
The popularity of this work by Zafón was in fact aided (but perhaps also suppressed?) by other books that came out around the same time, most notably The Da Vinci Code. To me the genre eventually lost its charm because of that and I didn’t read the subsequent sequels.
But…
You knew it was coming.
But, this book was more than that genre. The author was more than that genre. He was touted as a modern Cervantes, and that was something!
The Shadow of the Wind was a little personal for me. Through it I was introduced to the beauty of language, and this world of reading and readers in a manner I had not seen before. To my now older mind, it might seem filled with trite notions of how important books are; I mean they are but maybe people don’t need to die for them; but back when I read it, it was a door that suddenly opened into a room that I knew I would come to love.
This has been with me since the first time I read it -
“Once, in my father's bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return.”
This wasn’t that book for me, but it was the one who told me to keep an eye out for it, and that was something.
I wish I had remembered this quote before, perhaps told you about it in a different circumstance, but death distills memories like no other.
So when news came this past weekend that Zafón had passed away, it saddened me more than the others who left in this season of death. He was 55 and sure had more to tell and more to read. A lover of words, books, and stories if there ever was one.
I was going through the obituaries and remembrance by other fans of his work. And I found this beautiful snippet from his last book - The Labyrinth of the Spirits.
I leave you with that.
Here’s to finding stories and books and words that find their way into your heart.