Posts Tagged: Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Review

Review | The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

By Aidan Moher August 6th, 2009
The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

The Angel’s Game

Author – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Hardcover
Pages: 544 pages
Publisher: Doubleday
Release Date: June 16th, 2009
ISBN-10: 0385528701

Certainly the best novel I’ve read this year, The Shadow of the Wind may very well be my favourite novel I’ve ever read. Zafon’s haunting tale of love, lust, revenge and friendship has everything I could want from a novel and more. It’s not often that a novel can actually live up to the hype surrounding it; it’s even less often when a novel can surpass that hype, but that is exactly what The Shadow of the Wind accomplished. I eagerly await the English translation of El Juego del Angel.

So ended my review of The Shadow of the Wind by Spanish author Carlos Ruiz Zafon. Strong words, but sounding no less true from where I sit now, months removed from writing them. In fact, my opinion of the novel has only grown, as I look back on it and reminisce – there’s no quibbling about it anymore, The Shadow of the Wind is my favourite novel, by a fair margin.

So where does that put me now, having finished that novel I was so eagerly referring to in the first review? I’ve read The Angel’s Game (the English title of El Juego del Angel), and have had to sit for weeks, letting my thoughts coalesce into something that I can define coherently enough to call it a review.
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Review

Review | The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

By Aidan Moher October 1st, 2008
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

The Shadow of the Wind

Author – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Paperback
Pages: 487 pages
Publisher: Penguin
Release Date: January 25, 2005
ISBN-10: 0143034901

Years ago, when I last travelled through Europe, standing in the middle of a bustling bookstore in a Cologne train station, I held a copy of Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind in my hands. I contemplated it, having heard the first rumblings of the novel and its quality. I ended up putting it back on the shelf, not purchasing it. Ever since that day, I regretted not reading it on that trip, and so when it came time to hit the train stations of Europe, I made sure to bring a copy with me.

This time, as my train trundled its slow way through the quaint, rolling hills of northern Slovakia, I was gazing out the window, The Shadow of the Wind resting on the seat beside me.

“Ahh, I’ve read that one,” says the young man across from me, broken English tumbling its way inelegantly through his thick accent. “Museum of Forgotten Books, right?”

“Yeah,” I said, encouraged by his enthusiasm.

“It’s good. A good book,” he said.

The young fellow on the train may have had the name of the fabled Cemetery of Forgotten Books wrong (though it could have been lost in the Slovakian translation), but he certainly got one thing right – The Shadow of the Wind is a good book. A very good book.
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