The Shadow of the Wind

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
1950's Barcelona. Young Daniel, son of a bookseller, investigates a mysterious author, trying to discover why a scar-faced man is seeking out every copy of his books for burning.

Circling back to finish up the December reads. This one was creepy and gothic, and an excellent translation. It's one of those books that would be utterly absorbing when I was reading it, pulling me hypnotically into postwar Spain and the fear and the grief and Daniel's complicated coming-of-age. And then whenever I wasn't reading it I would think back in some puzzlement, because as stories go, it was thin and rather overblown in summary. That's actually an endorsement, if you couldn't tell.

The thing is, though, that one little snag really can quietly sour a book for you. Here it was a terribly clichéd blind character. She had a sexuality, at least, wonder of wonders, but she honest-to-God went around feeling people's faces. Seriously! I hadn't seen that one trotted out in quite a while. Hint: if you are blind from early in life as she was, you don't go around pawing at people's faces. You don't care about people's faces – why would you? This whole feeling people's faces shtick is just what you get when a sighted person assumes that a blind person would of course go flailing after visual information they can't see instead of, oh I don't know, proceeding with much more useful and relevant cues available to the other senses.

…Even more annoyed than I thought I was, apparently. Oi.

It's still a really good book. No, really.

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