Showing posts with label Carlos Ruiz Zafón. Show all posts

Saturday, November 20, 2021

Carlos Ruiz Zafón / The Angel's Game / Pip goes to Catalonia

Pip goes to Catalonia

Giles Tremlett on a Catalan prequel

Giles Tremlett

Saturday 13 June 2009

he identity of Carlos Ruiz Zafón's literary hero soon becomes crystal clear in The Angel's Game, a Gothic prequel to his immensely successful The Shadow of the Wind. The breeze from Charles Dickens and his Great Expectations blows through this novel from the start, as a hero who starts off as a Catalan version of Dickens's hard-done-by young Pip looks set for both greater things and troubled times. There are other winks at Great Expectations, which soon gets name-checked and finally appears as a gift to the young hero that causes him to be beaten black and blue by his father - a lost, violent, book-hating soul from the putrid underworld of early 20th century Barcelona.

The Prince of Mist by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Orion Audiobooks

Rachel Redford
Sunday 20 June 2020

Published in Spain as a novel for young adults in 1993, eight years before Ruiz Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind, this story clearly foreshadows that novel's mesmerising, chilling quality.

In 1943 a Jewish family escape their city to an old house by the sea. But greater dangers lurk in the sinister and nebulous figure of the Prince of Mist, who wreaks revenge for old grievances through Max, his sisters and his new-found friend.

With present and past entangled with the real and the unreal, it makes astonishingly cinematic listening, its sophisticated mystery heightened by the narration.

THE GUARDIAN

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón review / A triumph of imagination

Carlos Ruiz Zafón - Bea (La Sombra del Viento / A sombra do vento ...

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón review - a triumph of imagination

One man’s compulsion to find the truth leads to devilish encounters

Robert Colvile

Sunday 6 June 2014

uried in the back streets of Barcelona lies the Cemetery of Lost Books - a mausoleum for out-of-print works, salvaged by the bibliophiles of the city. There, 10-year-old Daniel Sempere discovers a book called The Shadow of the Wind, by Julián Carax, which captures his young imagination.

But when he investigates this unknown author, he finds out that his is the last surviving copy, as a mysterious figure called Laín Coubert has dedicated himself to eradicating Carax’s work completely. But in Carax’s book, Laín Coubert is the name of the Devil.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón - The Shadow of the Wind / #awordfromJoJo ...

Over the next decade (no hurried thriller this), Daniel begins to investigate Carax’s life, piecing together the secrets and tragedies that shadowed the author’s life and work. In doing so, he stirs up vendettas and memories that threaten his own safety, as well as finding unnerving correspondences between the author’s life and his own. Compelled to learn more, Daniel incurs the wrath of more tangible enemies than the shadowy Coubert - most alarmingly, a sadistic policeman with secrets of his own.

Daniel is a believably awkward teenager - compassionate (he rescues a former prisoner, Fermín Romero de Torres, from life on the streets), but naive and romantically inept. Having lost his mother as a child, he admits that he cannot even remember what she looked like and is afraid of her photograph for fear he would see a stranger. Women are hence unknowable, frightening creatures, their hearts a ‘labyrinth of subtleties’ - yet Daniel, like Julián, risks life and limb for the sake of women above his station.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón - The Shadow of the Wind (с изображениями)

Under the dictator

Michael Kerrigan is intrigued by Carlos Ruiz Zafón's intricate novel of 1940s Barcelona, The Shadow of the Wind

Michael Kerrigan

Saturday 26 June 2004

The Shadow of the Wind
by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, translated by Lucia Graves
416pp, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £12.99

In an age of unrelenting austerity, any touch of luxury can stir the soul; a brandname has a poetry all its own. And when a society is, like Franco's Spain, imprisoned in stultifying economic and imaginative autarchy, any hint of imported glamour represents an escape. Hence the care invested by a character in The Shadow of the Wind in his choice of taxi for a trip across town: "He wanted to get into a Studebaker at the very least."

The Shadow of the Wind. Carlos Ruiz Zafón. | Carlos ruiz, Libros ...

The 1940s Barcelona of Carlos Ruiz Zafón's new novel is by no means the trendy tourist destination of today; rather, it's a city shut down for the duration in death and fear. Its buildings pockmarked by gunfire or abandoned by bankrupt dynasties, it is a place in material and metaphorical ruins. Survivors of civil war, its people hang on grimly, with no apparent expectation of better times. Stalked by secret police, with only a kitsch and collaborationist Catholicism for spiritual comfort, they lead lives of unrelieved monotony and hardship. Yet such people will snatch at scraps - and, as Zafón shows, find real sustenance in a city streetscape whose every corner tells a story. Many of its secrets may be sinister, but we have a sense too of a realm of mystery the regime can't reach, a place in which a taxi ride can become a romantic quest.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Carlos Ruiz Zafón obituary

Michael Eaude

Sunday 21 de junio de 2020

Carlos Ruiz Zafón, who has died of colon cancer aged 55, became famous with his 2001 literary thriller set in melancholy 1940s Barcelona, La Sombra del Viento (The Shadow of the Wind). Ignored at first by critics, it prospered by word of mouth. Now published in more than 40 languages, it has won numerous prizes and sold around 20m copies.

The Shadow of the Wind and the remarkable success of Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Cervantes' only equal in literary impact … Carlos Ruiz Zafón.
Photograph: Alberto Estévez

The Shadow of the Wind and the remarkable success of Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Although modelled on the storytelling of Dickens and Tolstoy, his enormously popular novels were sharply attuned to our times

Mark Lawson

Fridady 19 June 2020

lthough all of Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s most successful books were published in the 21st century – The Shadow of the Wind, the first of the quartet on which his reputation rests, appeared in Spanish in 2001, and in English three years later – he was, at heart, a 19th-century novelist. His aim, in which he succeeded, was to emulate the narratively propulsive but socially reflective fiction of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Leo Tolstoy.

Another pivotal influence was even more distant: back to the start of the 17th century and the book often regarded as the birth of the modern novel: Don Quixote, written by a compatriot, Miguel de Cervantes. It was often said in Spain that Ruiz Zafón was Cervantes’ only equal in literary impact, and the later writer’s fiction genuflected to that of his predecessor, especially in digressive style, tales within tales, and multiple subplots.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon at the launch of The Labyrinth of the Spirits
at the Expiatory Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Barcelona.
Photograph: Pau Barrena

Carlos Ruiz Zafón, author of The Shadow of the Wind, dies aged 55

The bestselling novelist, frequently described as the most-read Spanish author since Cervantes, had been diagnosed with colon cancer in 2018

Alison Flood

Friday 19 June 2020

Carlos Ruiz Zafón, the Spanish author of internationally bestselling novels including The Shadow of the Wind, has died at the age of 55.

The novelist, who was frequently described as the most-read Spanish author since Cervantes, died on Friday at his home in Los Angeles, his publisher Planeta announced. According to Spanish language reports, Ruiz Zafón had been diagnosed with colon cancer in 2018.

Pedro Sánchez, the Spanish prime minister, tweeted: “We have lost one of the world’s most read and most admired Spanish writers. Carlos Ruiz Zafón, a key novelist of our epoch, made a significant contribution to modern literature.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

'Shadow of the Wind' author Carlos Ruiz Zafón dead at 55

By ARITZ PARRA and ANDREW DALTON

Associated Press
June 19, 2020

MADRID — Carlos Ruiz Zafón, whose wildly popular 2001 novel “The Shadow of the Wind” led to three sequels and made him one of the world’s most beloved Spanish authors, has died. He was 55.

His Spanish publisher, Planeta, said in a statement Friday that Zafón died in Los Angeles. It gave no cause of death, but Zafón was known to have cancer.

“One of the most read and admired Spanish authors worldwide has left us,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said on Twitter. “Carlos Ruiz Zafón… leaves an important mark in modern literature. Thank you for letting us travel through your stories.”

“The Shadow of the Wind,” a literary thriller from 2001, was the first in his series “The Cemetery of Forgotten Books.”

The novel, set in Barcelona and mingling reality, fantasy and romance, recounts the son of a bookshop owner’s quest to find the works of a mysterious author and to learn who has been destroying them.

“Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul,” Zafón wrote in the novel in a quote that many were posting on social media after his death. “The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.”

The sprawling, detailed storytelling and world-building led some to compare Zafón to Dickens and Tolstoy. And the book’s worldwide popularity as a work of Spanish literature brought him comparisons to Cervantes.

Its 2004 translation into English, heavily praised and promoted by Stephen King, made Zafón an international literary superstar.

Every book has a soul." Carlos Ruiz Zafón - The Angel's Game ...

He would spend the next 16 years writing three sequels featuring the same literature-obsessed protagonist Daniel Sempere: 2008’s “The Angel’s Game,” 2011’s “The Prisoner of Heaven,” and 2017’s “The Labyrinth of Spirits.”

“Zafón’s writing is sumptuous and dark and epic,” author Livia Llewellyn wrote on Twitter Friday. “The Shadow of the Wind is one of those novels I return to every couple of years because it’s everything I love about writing and what it can when created by an absolute master.”

Amazon.com: The Angel's Game: A Psychological Thriller ...

Zafón’s works have been translated into more than 50 languages, according to Planeta, and have won numerous prizes.

Born in Barcelona in 1964, the son of an insurance salesman, Zafón worked as a publicist before becoming a full-time writer.

He first gained notice in 1993 with a horror-mystery novel for young adults, “The Prince of Mist.” It would become a trilogy along with 1994’s “The Midnight Palace” and 1995’s “The Watcher in the Shadows.”

Zafón was also an accomplished amateur pianist and composer — he humbly called it his “hobby” — who would sometimes play at his public readings and discussions.

He moved from Barcelona to Los Angeles in the 1990s and briefly worked as a screenwriter, but had far greater success by returning to novels. He split his time between the two cities for the rest of his life.

The gothic novel is not dead: Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of ...

In a personal essay on his website called “Why I Write,” Zafón said it was because he had no other choice.

“I am in the business of storytelling,” he wrote. “I always have been, always will be. It is what I’ve been doing since I was a kid. Telling stories, making up tales, bringing life to characters, devising plots, visualizing scenes and staging sequences of events, images, words and sounds that tell a story. All in exchange for a penny, a smile or a tear, and a little of your time and attention.”

PANTAGRAPH