Reading and Location.
I came to the realization that there are certain novels wherein the authors elevate their settings almost to the level of a protagonist. Most of them are big cities and if, by chance of whim, you possess a more intimate knowledge of their layout, history, and inhabitants, it increases manifold the reading experience. Even more when you reading them on the premises of the novel’s setting.
One of them is a series called The Cemetery of Forgotten Books by Carlos Ruis Zafrón, that I reread on insistence of my wife who wants to take the Zafrón literary tour here in Barcelona. Zafón’s novel is atmospheric, beguiling and thoroughly readable. If you thought the true gothic novel died with the 19th century, this will change your mind.
The Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a four-part literary series set in Barcelona from the 1930s to the 1960s, during and after the Spanish Civil War under the Francoist regime. It combines Gothic fiction with historical intrigue, and psychological drama, all centered around a mysterious, secret library that preserves books forgotten by time. The series begins with The Shadow of the Wind, where a young boy named Daniel is introduced to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books and selects a novel that leads him into a complex investigation involving lost authors, political repression, and personal tragedy. Subsequent volumes—The Angel’s Game, The Prisoner of Heaven, and The Labyrinth of the Spirits—expand the scope of the story across generations, revealing hidden connections between characters, the consequences of literary obsession, and the lasting impact of memory and storytelling. The plots of the four novels are complex and densely interrelated.
In 2001, Carlos Ruiz Zafón put the great Barcelona novel on the best-seller map with The Shadow of the Wind, the first installment of the series. Its merits: tying up with the realist narrative tradition to imagine a gothic city with the arts of the audiovisual. The writer does not pursue historic rigor, but rather creates unforgettable atmospheres. La Rambla is conjured up as “dawn poured” over it in a “wreath of liquid copper”.
Zafon’s book brings to life post-war post-Gothic Barcelona in a special way. The city does not take over from a story that focuses on its intense characters; there are no long architectural descriptions, no paeans to the glorious past. Yet the city is a person, present at every turn. A backdrop, a refuge, a cruel taskmaster, a friend offering solace. Zafon constructs a Gothic Barcelona, dark, elusive, misty and mysterious and he weaves it into the experiences of his characters. This is a city that I didn’t see before Zafrón opened my eyes.
In an interview to The Independent in 2012, Zafon said: “The haunting of history is ever present in Barcelona. I see cities as organisms, as living creatures. To me Madrid is a man and Barcelona is a woman. And it’s a woman who’s extremely vain. One of the great Catalan poets, Joan Maragall, wrote this famous poem in which he called Barcelona the great enchantress, or some kind of sorceress, and in which the city has this dark enticing presence that seduces and lures people. I think Barcelona has a lot of that.”
I always wondered why he moved away from Barcelona to live in the US. It must be some inane impulse that drives writers away from the places they love to enable them to write about. Carlos Ruis Zafrón died in Los Angeles on June 19th, 2020 at the age of 55 of colon cancer. Part of his ashes were buried in Los Angeles and the rest in Barcelona. THE CITY OF MIST is his final book — a collection of stories prepared before his death in June 2020, meant to be published posthumously. It is an extraordinary collection that offers eleven brief but vivid glimpses into the hidden corners of Barcelona, past and present. I hesitated if I should add it to the corpus of the series and finally decided that it was more an anecdote than a contribution to it.
I consider to follow up on this post with a couple of my past reading experiences that have affected me in similar ways during my ongoing relocations as a digital nomad.
