The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (3.5 stars)

Zafón certainly has some talent, and this is an impressive debut. I have a soft spot for books that love books:

Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. 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 Shadow of the Wind is a complex gothic love story that tended a little more towards soap opera than I would have liked. The improbable coincidences are, for the most part, carried by Zafón's strong writing. He creates some downright creepy scenes in the abandoned Aldaya mansion, and I loved his descriptions of Barcelona (you can see all the places he mentions on a Google map compiled by a fan).

I found it impossible not to love Fermin's character, the cheeky old soul, but like many other improbable things in the novel, the way Daniel decides to risk his father's business by offering him a job based on one encounter when Fermin was a drunk homeless person seems silly.

Early in the novel I was also annoyed by what seemed to be lackadaisical intimidation by the mysterious man with the scarred face - does he care about destroying these books or doesn't he? He appears to have years to spend just hanging outside the bookshop, and creating an occasional creepy encounter. This actually gets explained reasonably well at the end of the novel, so I relinquish the objection :)

But the biggest weakness of the book is the large amounts of exposition that are unceremoniously dumped into the flow of the story. These sections felt like very lazy background filling. On a number of occasions Zafón essentially writes a biography of the character and delivers it on thin pretext in a large chunk, instead of letting us learn about the character through experience, or meting out the necessary history more naturally. The meeting with Father Fernando Ramos was a particularly jarring example where Ramos exposes Daniel and Fermin as frauds pretending to be related to Carax, but then proceeds to tell them his entire life history and very personal details over dozens of pages anyway.

Despite these problems I did enjoy the novel, and was surprised by most of the (many) twists, but I would have loved it with less exposition and a darker, less Bold and the Beautiful, ending.

3.5 stars.