The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

At last, yes, at last! It was finito! What a read it was. Honestly, I thought it was never going to end, that the saga beginning in 1945, after the Civil War in Spain, was just too dragging and too detailed for my sensitive soul. Emotionally I shut down around the halfway mark, hanging onto the picturesque, descriptive prose for dear life, sensing a light at the end of the tunnel. 

Good lordie, miss molly, good gracious my angel, good heavens dear father! What a journey it was through the antique bookshop in Barcelona on Calle Santa Anna, to the streets of the city where the memories spilled like blood flowing like rain water though the gutters, where souls got ripped, raped and destroyed by the brutality of the war.

Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war, Daniel. We all keep quiet and they try to convince us that what we’ve seen, what we’ve done, what we’ve learned about ourselves and about others, is an illusion, a passing nightmare. Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened, until the moment comes when we no longer recognize them and they return, with another face and another name, to devour what they left behind.

1945. Barcelona Spain. It was a book, Shadows of the Wind by one Julián Carax, which brought the history alive for young Daniel. Not because it was explained in the book, but because through mysterious events after reading the book. It was a rare book, which reverberated quickly through the echoe chambers of the world of book collectors. It immediately draw attention as the last book of the author. Daniel Sempere made a promise never to tell where he he found it and protect it as his most precious possession.

Daniel's father: This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. 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 Cemetery of Forgotten Books, hidden behind heavy bolted doors and high walls, brought voices alive of authors passed and present, who needed their story discovered and told. 

Brave, curious, but innocent, ten-year-old Daniel Sempere did not foresee the consequences when he opened that particular book to read. Nor could the effect it would have on him and his father's life be calculated.

Clara: I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel.

And so it was for Daniel as well. 

People populated Daniel's life from different walks of life. His journey to become a man, would cross paths with villains and angels; carers and destroyers. His life would forever be connected to those who survived the manslaughter of war.

When peace finally came, it smelled of the sort of peace that haunts prisons and cemeteries, a shroud of silence and shame that rots one’s soul and never goes away.

Along the way, a pathos and empathy grew for the people who managed to survive. A tragicomedy, a suspense thriller, a historical fictional tale - a culmination of the voices and ambiance in books such as: 
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez; 
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières; 
The Time in Between by María Dueñas; 
Winter in Madrid by C.J. Sansom; 
Picasso's War by Russell Martin; 
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
The Return by Victoria Hislop
The Perfume Garden by Kate Lord Brown

Diction, motivation, actions - it all flows along the prose adding context to bravery and courage, unlocking the strange chain of destiny between them. To these people, hope was cruel, it had no conscious, and words were sometimes better of in their prison of memories. Daniel had the power to keep these voice on paper alive, to allow them to be remembered.

And then there is the backdrop of love in all its despicable, deceiving, destructive or honorable definitions. It meanders trough the labyrinth of the The Cemetery of Forgotten Books as well as the lives of the people who survived to tell their stories to Daniel. It was a constant reminder of what makes us all vulnerable and victorious in life. For Daniel, it was a fast, uncompromising road to adulthood in which no secrets remained hidden. For those who wanted to share their tales, words became a sort of melancholic revenge.

Nurieta Monford:  I began to dress like a pious widow or one of those women who seem to confuse sunlight with mortal sin. I went to work with my hair drawn back into a bun and no makeup. Despite my tactics, Sanmartí continued to shower me with lascivious remarks accompanied by his oily, putrid smile. It was a smile full of disdain, typical of self-important jerks who hang like stuffed sausages from the top of all corporate ladders.

While the first snow of winter dropped like tears of light on the Plaza de Cataluña, an old man, trying to catch the snow with his gloves, wished Daniel good luck, his eyes the color of gold, like magic coins at the bottom of a fountain. What else could Daniel do but clung to the blessing and run ...

The thing about words is that it takes us prisoner when rolled out by experienced wordsmiths. This is one of those moments, although I must admit that only the beginning chapters, almost to the middle, and the last third of the book finally captured me beyond imagination. I almost gave up, but the magic in the prose propelled me forward. Relentlessly.

I just realized why not anyone can write a book, but why everyone, like yours truly, can get lost in the melody flowing from the magical alphabetic strings, the symbiotic sounds of voices on paper. Sometimes it is this music that kept me reading, surpassing the moral of the story. The quality of thought and execution in this novel confirmed the addiction of words and books.

Humor and hope are strange bedfellows. It may manifest in the intimations of paradise ... a last dance with Eros ... 

Happiness in every which way had a purpose, even in galleries of despair, even softened by ecumenical disguise. Sincere laughter came. In 1966 it all made finally sense to Daniel Sempere. Doom and gloom have a counterbalance. A very good one. All it needed was time. And good readers to follow the light to the last full stop of the tale. 

The end.

Read this comprehensive and excellent biography of the author at

Classic Spanish Books

The Widow by Fiona Barton

This book touched me so deeply that I simply cannot talk about it. Anything I say will destroy the feelings I am left with.

I don't even want to fall back on clichés such as magnificent, wonderful, brilliant, unbelievable.

My emotional reaction to this book astounds me.  Gut wrenching, heart breaking.

I urgently need to take a walk ... 

Later then.

BLURB

'Me, the grieving widow? Don't make me laugh.'

A voice as startling and unreliable as The Girl On The Train, a cast as compelling as Broadchurch. 

Jean Taylor is the wife of a man labelled a monster.

Glen Taylor was accused of heinous crimes, implicated in the disappearance of two-year-old Bella Elliot, snatched from her front garden four years ago. But now he’s dead and Jean Taylor is finally ready to tell her story.

For the reporter who has secured the exclusive interview, this is the scoop of a lifetime. For the detective who has lived a half-life since he failed to get justice for the lost little girl, it is a chance to uncover the truth that has eluded him for so long.

It's time. Jean Taylor is going to tell us what she knows.

My career has taken some surprising twists and turns over the years. I have been a journalist - senior writer at the Daily Mail, news editor at the Daily Telegraph, and chief reporter at The Mail on Sunday, where I won Reporter of the Year at the National Press Awards, gave up my job to volunteer in Sri Lanka and since 2008, have trained and worked with exiled and threatened journalists all over the world.

But through it all, a story was cooking in my head.

The worm of my first book infected me long ago when, as a national newspaper journalist covering notorious crimes and trials, I found myself wondering what the wives of those accused really knew - or allowed themselves to know.

It took the liberation of my career change to turn that fascination into a tale of a missing child, narrated by the wife of the man suspected of the crime, the detective leading the hunt, the journalist covering the case and the mother of the victim.

Much to my astonishment and delight, The Widow was published in 36 countries and made the Sunday Times and New York Times Best Seller lists.

It gave me the confidence to write a second book ,The Child, in which I return to another story that had intrigued me as a journalist. It begins with the discovery of a newborn's skeleton on a building site. It only makes a paragraph in an evening newspaper but for three women it's impossible to ignore.

The Child will be published in June 2017 and I am embarking on my next novel. My husband and I are still living the good life in south-west France, where I am writing in bed, early in the morning when the only distraction is our cockerel, Titch, crowing.

 SOURCE: fionabartonauthor.com

The Nix by Nathan Hill

THE NOVEL AS SOCIAL COMMENTARY
The introductory epigraph, rather a longish one, contains the Utterances of a Buddha about blind men who had to touch an elephant and then report their findings to the king. Different parts of the elephant is touched by each man, resulting in different opinions of what the elephant is. This 'utterance' establishes the purpose, content and intent of this novel. It also allows different kind of readers to react differently to the elephant.

This complex autobiographical novel puts the spotlight on society as baggage from the previous century, inherited by generations who are dressed up with nowhere to go. It is written as social satire, or a tragicomedy in a way. It shoots straight into the concepts of true or false; the chaotic society as it is established in the postmodern ideology; a freedom demanded which throws any possibility for a structured society out; a democratic establishment so out of control that nothing can be accomplished - too many processes to hinder any final decision on anything. 

It is the postapocolypse of social implosion; a prologue to the survival of the fittest in a post-democratic nix(nothing; denial or refusal; put an end to or cancel): pseudonyms - nada, zilch, zero. It leaves the possibility of a renaissance in question.

The country is falling apart around us. This is plain even to the pay-no-attention-at-all crowd, even to the low-information undecided-voter segment. It’s all crumbling right in front of our eyes. People lose their jobs, their pensions disappear overnight, they keep getting those quarterly statements showing their retirement funds are worth ten percent less for the sixth quarter in a row, and their houses are worth half what they paid for them, and their bosses can’t get a loan to make payroll, and Washington is a circus, and they have homes full of interesting technology and they look at their smartphones and wonder ‘How could a world that produces something as amazing as this be such a shitty world?’

DOCUMENTARY NOVEL: PLOT
Two events triggered the plot. The 1968 protests in Chicago, and the 2011 protests in New York. The former was attended by a mother, prior to her marriage, and the latter by her son, many years after she disappeared.

The story opens in 2011 when the mother is arrested for throwing rocks/stones/pebbles at a presidential candidate. The size of the 'missiles' is irrelevant. It is the perceptions of the press, politicians and public that turns the events into the truth as they see it (the touching of the elephant).

"The story began as a family drama about an estranged mother and son, but over the years it morphed into a sprawling tale about politics, online gaming, academia, Norwegian mythology, social media, the Occupy Wall Street protests and the 1960s counterculture.

“The Nix” centers on a washed-up writer named Samuel Andresen-Anderson, who, after failing to live up to his early promise, has succumbed to a soul-crushing job as an adjunct professor of literature in a Chicago suburb. To escape the suffocating sense of failure, Samuel spends 40 hours a week playing the role of Dodger the Elven Thief in an online game called World of Elfscape, where he goes on dragon- and orc-slaying quests with his guild.

He’s pulled back into his traumatic past when he learns that his mother, Faye, who abandoned the family when he was 11, faces assault charges for throwing rocks at a politician." (Source:New York Times (Aug. 26, 2016))

The Nisse, derived from the Norwegian Mythology, is established in different aspects of the tale.

A nisse,” he said, and she nodded. She loved the weird names her father gave his ghosts: nisse, nix, gangferd, draug.

The 682-page novel reminds me of American Gods by Neil Gaiman in scope, although many other authors are thrown into the mix, such as John Irving, Charles Dickens, Donna Tartt, Michael Chabon, and Tom Wolfe to describe this debut author's work. The Kirkus Reviews noted “hints of Pynchon”.

The New York Times describes the novel as prickly social satire, which takes aim at academia, politics, publishing and social media.

The novel also reminds me of The Politically Correct Ultimate Storybook: Politically Correct Bedtime Stories by James Finn Gardner. 

A big bowl of reality with a dollop of mythology and fairy-fun added to it. Top it off with a hint of stand-up comedy and a very strong storyline. The book was so autobiographical that the author had to promise his mom that she was not the character Faye in the book. 

One of the most striking and emotionally-charged metaphors in the book, for me, was when Sam's mom, Faye, told him to choose nine toys and arrange them in his toy wagon to go for a walk. While they were out strolling on the street, they passed trees in which one lonely maniacal leaf near the top of the tree was standing up, dancing in the wind, flopping around like a fish, while the rest hung quietly in the dead air. (Pathetic fallacy at work here?)

Faye pointed out the leaf and the significance of it. "A ghost", she said." "Someone not good enough to go to heaven but not bad enough to go to hell. He's in between."

..."He's restless, she said. "He wants to move on..." 

Sam started crying again. He did not want to be that leaf. Faye turned around and took him home, told him to put his toys away. Faye told Sam that he should have brought all nine toys, and not only eight. He should have paid more attention. 

Little did she realize that he counted the wagon as the ninth toy...

That was a few months before she disappeared, leaving a marriage in which a spoon tried to love garbage disposal forever...

COMMENTS
It all depends on which part of the elephant you have touched to interpret this monumental tale. It can be sensational, thrilling, gripping, informative, thought-provoking, witty, funny, sad, or whatever you need from this literary masterpiece. A journalistic reality worked into a mythical mystery. An icon of our times. A good one.

So by the way, who remembers the longest paragraph I have ever encountered in a book in my entire life? Pages and pages! Guinness Book of Records material. In the last section of the book.


Quotes from the book:

Pwnage once told Samuel that the people in your life are either enemies, obstacles, puzzles, or traps...

...So instead of looking for answers, he’d begun simply writing her story, thinking that if he could see the world the way she saw it, maybe he’d achieve something greater than mere answers: Maybe he’d achieve understanding, empathy, forgiveness. So he wrote about her childhood, about growing up in Iowa, about going to Chicago for college, about the protest in 1968, about that final month she was with the family before she disappeared, and the more he wrote the more expansive the story became. Samuel wrote about his mother and father and grandfather, he wrote about Bishop and Bethany and the headmaster, he wrote about Alice and the judge and Pwnage—he was trying to understand them, trying to see the things he was too self-absorbed to see the first time through. Even Laura Pottsdam, vicious Laura Pottsdam, Samuel tried to locate a little sympathy for her...

...What Faye won’t understand and may never understand is that there is not one true self hidden by many false ones...

...You don’t once consider how Bethany or Bishop might feel about this violation of their privacy. You are so blinded by your desire to impress and dazzle and awe the people who left you that you say yes. Yes, absolutely...

...This is not something you tell your teacher. This is something you carry on the inside, in a cavity filled with every true thing about you so that there is nothing true left on the outside. The morning your mother disappeared, especially, is stuffed way down deep, your mother asking you what you wanted to be when you grew up...

...You’d be amazed at the facts people are willing to set aside to believe that life is, indeed, great...

...then she grew up and came to a new conclusion, which she told Samuel in the month before leaving the family. She told him the same story but added her own moral: “The things you love the most will one day hurt you the worst...

...Everyone knew this, so they suffered the headmaster’s long and vivid descriptions of medical procedures and bodily effluence because they thought of it as a kind of investment in their child’s education and future...

......it's way easier to ignore all data that doesn't fit your preconceptions and believe all data that does. I believe what I believe, and you believe what you believe, and we'll agree to disagree. It's liberal tolerance meets dark ages denialism. It's very hip right now. 

Nathan Hill’s literary career almost ended before it started.

Like so many optimistic young M.F.A. graduates, Mr. Hill moved to New York City in his 20s with a hard drive full of short stories, hoping to land an agent and a publisher.

Perhaps predictably, things didn’t go according to plan. His early overtures to literary agents brought rejections. Then one day in the summer of 2004, when he was moving out of a house in Queens where he lived with 11 other guys, his car was broken into. He lost all of his possessions, including his computer and his backup drive. All of his work in progress vanished.

He sulked for a while and played lots of World of Warcraft, an online fantasy game. Eventually, though, he started something new. The story began as a family drama about an estranged mother and son, but over the years it morphed into a sprawling tale about politics, online gaming, academia, Norwegian mythology, social media, the Occupy Wall Street protests and the 1960s counterculture.

Now, 12 years later, that novel, “The Nix,” is being published by Alfred A. Knopf...
Source: New York Times

The Egg and I (Betty MacDonald Memoirs #1) by Betty MacDonald

This is one of the most funniest and fascinating memoirs I have ever read. I want to add some quotes later on. This book is a must-read.

THEN .... LATER ON ...
We had a power cut yesterday and since my iPad was low on battery power as well, I did not want to spend it writing reviews. So I waited until today to add some memorable quotes from the book to my thoughts. There was so much in the book to relate to, living in the mountains myself and having to deal with similar adventures(yes, even many decades after this book was published), that I just had the laughs of my life reading this book.

Her outright honesty, just being herself, was really so refreshing!

Sooooo, some quotes: lots o'em!!!

...I was too fat and I wanted desperately not to eat and be willowy and romantic but there seemed nothing else to do. Bob ate almost nothing and looked furtive like a trapped animal. I guess it is quite a wrench for a bachelor to give up his freedom, particularly when, every time he looks at his wife, he realizes that he is facing a future teeming with large grocery bills...

...The moonshine in a gallon jug was a dark amber color and had a hot explosive smell. We had a drink before dinner that night and it went down with lights flashing like marbles in a pinball game...

... And then winter settled down and I realized that defeat, like morale, is a lot of little things...

...WHEN you make a complete change in your mode of living, as I did, you learn that, along with the strange aspects of the new life which seep in and become part of you, will come others to which you never become accustomed. Some of the things I never got used to were:
The hen.
The gasoline lantern.
The outhouse at night where I had a horrible choice of either sitting in the dark and not knowing what was crawling on me or bringing a lantern and attracting moths, mosquitoes, night hawks and bats.
No radio.
No telephone.
Bats hanging upside down in the cellar, flying in the open bedroom windows on summer nights, swooping low over the bed, almost touching my face and making my skin undulate in horror. Dropping boards and chicken lice.
The inconsistency of a Mother Nature who made winter so wetly, coldly, soggily miserable that I wanted to get back under my stone, and spring so warm, so lush and fragrant that I wanted to roll on my back and whinny...

...(Cinnamon roles) were so tender and delicate I had to bring myself up with a jerk to keep from eating a dozen. The coffee was so strong it snarled as it lurched out of the pot and I girded up my loins for the first swallow and was amazed to find that when mixed with plenty of thick cream it was palatable. True it bore only the faintest resemblance to coffee as I made it but still it had a flavor that was good when I got my throat muscles loosened up again...

...Mary MacGregor had fiery red, dyed hair, a large dairy ranch and a taste for liquor. Drunker than an owl, she would climb on to her mowing machine, “Tie me on tight, Bill!” she would yell at her hired man. So Bill would tie her on with clothes lines, baling wire and straps, give her the reins and away she’d go, singing at the top of her voice, cutting her oats in semi-circles and happy as a clam. She plowed, disked, harrowed, planted, cultivated and mowed, tied to the seat of the machine and hilariously drunk. A smashing witticism of the farmers was, “You should take a run down the valley and watch Mary sowin’ her wild oats.”...

...Mary sold cream to the cheese factory. One morning she found a skunk drowned in a ten-gallon can of cream. She lifted the skunk out by the tail and with her other hand she carefully squeezed the cream from his fur. “Just between us skunks, cream is cream,” she said as she threw the carcass into the barnyard. She sold the cream and vowed she’d never tell a soul but Bill the hired man told everyone, especially people he saw coming out of the cheese factory with a five-pound round of cheese...

The good layers looked motherly, their combs were full and bright red, their eyes large, beaks broad and short, and their bodies were well rounded, broad-hipped and built close to the ground. They were also the diligent scratchers and eaters and their voices seemed a little lower with overtones of lullaby. The non-producers, the childless parasites, were just as typical. Their combs were small and pale, eyes small, beaks sharp and pointed, legs long, hips narrow, and they spent all of their time gossiping, starting fights, and going into screaming hysterics over nothing. The non-producers also seemed subject to many forms of female trouble—enlarged liver, wire worms, and blowouts (prolapse of the oviduct). What a bitter thing for them that, unlike their human counterparts, their only operation was one performed with an axe on the neck...

... I got out iodine, bandages, sleeping tablets and my self-control, because, though Bob was being brave and careless in front of Elwin, alone with me, he would act as if the bear had laid open both his lungs and his large intestine, and would spend many happy hours looking for the first signs of blood poisoning. It occurred to me then, that no mention had been made of our dog’s part in the fray... 

I think this book will be one of my all time favorites. I've learnt early in my own expeditions into the wild that a healthy sense of humor was the only thing that will keep me sane and happy. Instead of being mad, frustrated, depressed, I wrote down my experiences for friends and family in long letters that had everyone hollering with laughter. They phoned me with tears of merriment in their voices. It was my way of healing and balancing out life. So in every sense of the word, I identified with Beth and knew what she was trying to accomplish. I felt like her.

The first book written by Betty MacDonald, The Egg and I , rocketed to the top of the national bestseller list in 1945. Translations followed in more than 30 languages, along with a series of popular movies. In the wake of World War II, the hilarious accounts of MacDonald's adventures as a backwoods farmer's wife in Chimacum Valley were a breath of fresh air for readers around the world. On the negative side, her book spawned a perception of Washington as a land of eccentric country bumpkins like Ma and Pa Kettle.

Anne Elizabeth Campbell Bard, called Betsy in childhood and later known world-wide as Betty MacDonald, was born in Boulder, Colorado, to Darsie and Elsie/Sydney Bard on March 26, 1908. Her father, a mining engineer, moved the family frequently before settling in Seattle. Betty attended the St. Nicholas School on Capitol Hill, then Lincoln High School. In 1924 she graduated from Roosevelt High School.

On July 9, 1927, Betty Bard married Robert E. Heskett and moved with him to the farm in the tiny community of Center in the Chimacum Valley near Port Townsend that lacked both plumbing and electricity. Betty later regaled family and friends with stories of her struggles during this time, eventually transforming them into the book that would make her famous.

After four years, Betty left Robert Hesket, taking their two daughters, Anne and Joan, with her. She returned to the family home in Seattle and worked at various jobs, keeping her sense of humor and her journal even when tuberculosis forced her to spend a year at Firland Sanatorium in what is now the city of Shoreline.

On April 29, 1942, she married Donald C. MacDonald (1910-1975) and moved with him and her daughters to a beach home on Vashon Island. Built as a summer home, it was cold and damp and in need of improvements. Anne and Joan enrolled in school while Don and Betty commuted to Seattle for work every day. Betty later described her daily scramble from home to the ferry dock in [book:Onions In The Stew|:

"It was always seven o'clock and my ferry left at seven-twenty and I should have left at six-fifty and now I would have to run the last quarter of a mile. I wore loafers and woolen socks over my silk stockings, carried my office shoes along with my lunch, purse, current book and grocery list in a large green felt bag. The county trail connecting our beach with the rest of the world begins at a cluster of mailboxes down by the dock, meanders along the steep southwest face of the island about fifty feet above the shore, and ends at our house ... if it was dark when I left the house (and it usually was) I ... ran the rest of the way to the ferry ... This boisterous early morning activity also started my blood circulating, churning, really, and by the time I got to the office I was not only bileless, I was boiling hot" (p. 57). 

Their fortune changed with a call from MacDonald's sister, Mary Bard Jensen (1904-1970). At a cocktail party, Mary ran into a friend who was a publishing company scout and told him that Betty was writing a book (which she was not). Betty whipped up the proposal for The Egg and I to save her sister embarrassment. The scout requested a full manuscript, which was rejected by one publishing house. With the assistance of the New York literary agency Brandt & Brandt, the book was serialized in the Atlantic Monthly and then published by J.B. Lippincott. She dedicated the book "To my sister Mary, who has always believed that I can do anything she puts her mind to."

The Breakdown by B.A. Paris

Cass was on the wrong road during a terrible storm. She saw a woman in a car in the middle of the woods, in the middle of the night. She did not stop long enough. She was too scared. It was raining so hard she could not understand why the woman did not ask her for help. Neither of them left their cars. The storm was rolling over them, preventing them to make contact, get out. When she arrived home she could not remember the mundane little things and needed her husband to remind her of appointments, events, invitation, setting the alarm clock. What was wrong with her? Why was it so difficult to pull herself together? And why could she not trust herself?

The answers came unexpectedly and too late.

I knew since the very beginning what was going on, but did not know how the drama would play itself out. Curiosity let me into almost the same predicament as the protagonist. Hers was serious. Cass was riddled with confusion and guilt. So was I, but for very different reasons. While she struggled to escape her situation, I had no intentions whatsoever to leave this psychological thriller and surface before the very end.

What a sad ending it was! I just wanted to cry for them all, while being relieved that it was over. What if she took a different route? What if ...

Water under the bridge, yes. For Cass the solution brought new possibilities and a new future. So it was a good ending. But was it really? After all that she went through Cass deserved a new tomorrow. An innocent, new born day...

This afternoon it was raining outside. Wonderful rain after three years of devastating drought. The four cats and two dogs were on the bed with me, listening to the storm outside. I was under a light blanket, reading as though my life depended on it. It was the perfect book for the perfect day.

I actually smiled when I finished this cozy book. Sadly I cannot tell you why ... :-))
I can tell you this, though, I will absolutely read this author again.

Excellent!

B A Paris grew up in England but has spent most of her adult life in France. She has worked both in finance and as a teacher and has five daughters. Behind Closed Doors is her first novel.