Carlos Ruiz Zafón seems to have a mission: to revive the Gothic novel, with a twist, in the 21st century. Barcelona serves as the centre of his dark universe gorging with disfigured protagonists, fantastic architecture, soul searching writers, evil editors, kindly librarians, corrupt policemen, haunted houses, intense sexual encounters, fallen angels and earthly demons and, most of all, an unabashed delving into the darkest reaches of the human mind.
Ruiz Zafón’s two Gothic novels, however, are also a celebration of the creative imagination as embodied in the often lonely – and in his protagonists’ rather bleak universe – the dangerous craft of the writer. His love of literature and the impact it can have on the lives of the readers is, in part, symbolized by the slightly sinister Cemetery of Forgotten Books.
The Cemetery of Forgotten Books
The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a mysterious labyrinthine repository of books in the underground heart of old Barcelona – watched over by the gruff guardian Isaac – serves as the catalyst for young Daniel Sempere, the avid reader in The Shadow of the Wind and David Martín, the writer in the prequel, The Angel’s Game.
These forgotten books are aborted attempts, for various reasons, at immortality on the part of the authors, but are held in trust by the mysterious benefactors of the Cemetery, which dates back several centuries. These books are clinically dead until revived by the readers who save them, thus resurrecting the authors like Lazarus rising from the grave.
Since books, according to Ruiz Zafón’s quintessential librarian, Sempere, are a physical and spiritual manifestation of the authors’ souls, it is from this premise that the protagonists encounter trouble when they seek to discover more about the authors whose books seem to have chosen them in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.
The literary triumvirate between author, his book and his reader sets the heroes on a journey in which they not only discover the source of their fascination but expose them to both truths and lies strewn with violence and betrayal as well as love and redemption.
The Creator, the Created and the Creative Process as Plot Line
The Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a new and original tool in Gothic literature – one that embodies both the genre and its creator-fashioner – in an age when the world of art prizes the artistic process as much, if not more, than the final artistic product.
Ruiz Zafón places the writer and by extension, literature itself, squarely in the middle of his literary universe. Divine inspiration, hours spent sweating at the typewriter, either in a frenzy or stumped by writer’s block, or being so engrossed by a story that it literally takes on its own life, not to mention the constellation of editors, librarians, book connoisseurs and publishing houses - all these are interwoven into his Faustian storytelling.
Humble implements of writing, like Victor Hugo’s fabled pen in The Shadow of the Wind, and the Underwood typewriter in The Angel’s Game, as well as a prized copy of Dicken’s Great Expectations, are all treated as sacred objects in Ruiz Zafón’s two books. But his greatest contribution is no doubt the creation of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books and the pantheon of actors that surround it, serving as a wonderful storytelling source and literary tour de force in reviving Gothic literature.
Sylvie Nantais - My love of words began by the age of three. I hung around my siblings and learned to read before I even began school. I started writing ...
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