Book Review: Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind in prison. It was recommended, I had no great expectations, but was enjoyably wrong in my expectation.

He died in 2020 but now has out a short story collection. From The Brisbane Times comes this review and these paragraphs:

Here was a novelist besotted with the written word to such an extent that in his work the world is the illusory thing, and only the printed page feels truly alive. He turned his beloved Barcelona into a shadowy realm filled almost exclusively with writers, readers, booksellers and archivists, a world remade as an endless sprawl of stories, and stories within stories. Few contemporary writers cited Wilkie Collins as an influence, fewer still wrote with his pre-20th-century amplitude.

It’s with some small irony, then, that this posthumous collection – assembled and approved by Zafon before his death – is so slender and delicate. With no desire to replicate the sprawl of his novels, The City of Mist works instead as its own kind of marginalia and echo.

I will keep an eye out for this collection because I did find the novel so much fun. 

BTW, let me recommend The Brisbane Times for its book section. I am finding ut more educational - that us less constipated in its opinions - than The New York Times.

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1/22/22