. Spinning .

I spoke a page too soon; our little Daniel finally does have sex…I think…with his friend’s sister, Bea.

A thousand times I’ve wished to return and lose myself in a memory from which I can rescue only one image stolen from the heat of the flames: Bea, naked and glistening with rain, lying by the fire, with open eyes that have followed me since that day.  I leaned over her and passed the tips of my fingers over her belly.  Bea lowered her eyelids and smiled, confident and strong.

"Do what you like to me," she whispered.

She was seventeen, her entire life shining before her.  (p. 200)

"Do what you like to me," she whispered?  Bea knows damn well that this is Daniel’s first time and likely doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do much less what he’d like to do.

And what’s with the She was seventeen, her entire life shining before her.?  What’s that got to do with the moment?  Is he about to wreck her prospects by getting it on with her?

But author Zafon has already presented us with a penny-romance novel moment, when the 16 year-old Daniel sees the object of his adoration doing it with her music teacher:

Clara’s naked body lay stretched out  on white sheets that shone like washed silk.  Maestro Neri’s hands slid over her lips, her neck and her breasts.  Her white eyes looked up to the ceiling, her eyelids flickering as the music teacher charged at her, entering her body between pale and trembling thighs. The same hands that had read my face six years earlier in the gloom of the Ateneo now clutched the maestro’s buttocks that were glistening with sweat, digging her nails into them and guiding him towards her with desperate, animal desire.(p. 48)

Again with the glistening, the trembling and the flickering eyelids.

Oh yeah, hot sex.

According to the back cover, the Daily Telegraph hailed this novel as "Carlos Ruiz Zafon has done that exceedingly rare thing–he has produced, in his first novel, a popular masterpiece, an instant classic."

Bull.

I’t s good, the story is interesting, the characters, well, some are well drawn although the main character of Daniel, the narrator, hasn’t gotten to me and I’m at the halfway point in the book.

Daniel is what, like eighteen years old and spent five years or more with the pre-adolescent feelings towards an older woman?  No girlfriends?  No sex?  This is 1953 after all, and European in free thinking–or might I say, more down-to-earth thinking about sex than the American of this era.

The writing is so-so.  There’s an awful lot of telling instead of showing, and as I’ve posted, the backstory is not professionally presented to my way of thinking about "a classic."

It’s a 400-pager that to me, minus the street and character names, and the repetition of the plot by just about anyone that Daniel comes into contact with, could have been concisely and even more imagery-ladened been put into about 200 pages.

Every now and then I start to wonder if it’s just a case of sour grapes that affects my thinking.  This is how I deal in daily life as well, though; trying to play the devil’s advocate, see the other side, doubt myself and my own abilities to avoid falsely influenced judgements. 

But then again, if no one’s right or wrong according to the liberal "I’m okay, you’re okay" manner of thinking, I guess I have the right to my own opinion.

While mystery stories always require an unraveling of the mystery, I frankly don’t feel that Zafon has mastered mystery unraveling.

The necessary backstory is given by a character to Daniel, the narrator and clue-seeker. One lead takes him and his friend, Fermin, to see a Father Fernando, a monk at St. Gabriel’s School where Julian Carax, the author of the novel, went to classes along with a few friends whose names we’ve slowly gotten and whose character have neatly been tied into the story.

However, when we have a priest remembering twenty or more years back (he turns out to have been a classmate and friend of Julian’s) and giving exact conversation where he was not even present, I have a problem with that.

While Zafon has put the priest’s story in italics and does not present it in the first person, it has been started as coming from the priest and ended as such.  Since Zafon employs the use of chapters in this novel, I would think that a better structure to present this backstory would simply have been to give it a chapter of its own and leave it to the reader to realize that we are going back in time.

Zafon appears afraid to break out of linear narration and utilizes his characters instead to tell "what happened way back when."  The problem is that we are given these jumps back with additional characters and details that read like an obvious "clue" or missing piece to the story.  I sort of wish that since all these folks cropping up are within Daniel’s easy traveling distance, he would get them all together at a cookout and solve it right then and there, with steaks, potato salad, and a couple beers.

Now we have Daniel’s (the narrator’s) new friend, Fermin (a middle aged politically charged character who was hunted down by the regime until he ended up a beggar on the streets) listening to the story of the book, the author Julian, and the rundown of Daniel’s search into the mystery.

While the cast of characters is ever-growing, and the threads of time and setting seem to be a spiderweb rather than a barbed wire fence motif, the tendency to rehash is a bit overdone and while I might call it amateurish, I must keep in mind that this is indeed Zafon’s initial novel.

Just as I noticed in Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, Zafon seems to give in to that writer’s devil that tempts him to explain:

I began my story with that distant dawn when I awoke and could not remember my mother’s face, and I didn’t stop until I paused to recall the world of shadows I had sensed that very morning in the home of Nuria Montfort.  Bea listened quietly, making no judgment, drawing no conclusions.  I told her about my first visit to the Cemetary of Forgotten Books and about the night I spent reading The Shadow of the Wind.  I told her about my meeting with the faceless man and about the letter signed by Penelope Aldaya that I always carried with me without knowing why.  I spoke about how I had never kissed Clara Barcelo, or anyone, and of how my hands trembled when I felt the touch of Nuria Montfort’s lips on my skin, only a few hours before.  I told her how, until that moment, I had not understood that this was a story about lonely people, about absence and loss, and that that was why I had taken refuge in it until it became confused with my own life, like someone who has escaped into the pages of a novel because those whom he needs to love seem nothing more than ghosts inhabiting the mind of a stranger.  (p. 147)

At this point, I felt well gee, why did I bother reading the first 146 pages if it was all going to be synopsized here?  Was Zafon afraid that I wasn’t going to "get it?"  That perhaps I fell asleep or got too busy for a couple days and needed to be caught up on the reading?

There’s another problem here; in a first person pov, the sentence, "Bea listened quietly, making no judgment, drawing no conclusions."  is a hop into a minor character’s head that really should have ended right after the word quietly as that would have indicated no verbal judgment. The rest is an assumption, as the narrator could not know what was going on in Bea’s head.  Minor error, but I’m becoming very aware of these slip-ups (and likely becoming a real PITA about it).