The Greatest Book I've Ever Read
It's a good one, bruh
A good book is like a good friend. It will stay with you for the rest of your life. — Charlie Lovett
How often do we hear an echo of the quote above? Plenty of times, que no? Yet, how often do we find a book that lives up to those words? That truly transports us to another world, that makes us forget we’re reading words on a page because, bruh, we’re experiencing those words—living those words?
Rare. It’s downright fucking rare.
As a child, the books I called a good friend were The Series of Unfortunate Events series, and the Percy Jackson & The Olympians series. As an adult, however, I never had a good friend. I had friends, sure, lots of friends, but these friends, just like in life, came and went, gone like the wind.
But, the funny thing about forgotten friends is that you never know when they’ll return to your life. Funnier still is the possibility of a friend evolving into a good friend upon their return.
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón is that forgotten friend that will now stay with me for the rest of my life.
First Appearance
The Shadow of the Wind was given to me by the stepmom of an ex when I was seventeen or eighteen years old. She told me, “I think you’ll like this book.”
She wasn’t wrong. I Iiked it, loved it, fuck bruh, the ninth chapter in which our main character, Daniel, loses a part of his innocence will forever be engraved in my mind. As is the personality of Daniel’s friend, Fermin Romero de Tores, who felt—and still feels—like someone from my life I see as an uncle.
You’d think because of this love that I’d finish the book but… somewhere before the hundredth page, I lost interest. I can’t remember why. Trouble in paradise? Misery with my life at the time? Busy with college? All of the above and then some?
And then some.
Lo and behold, I lost the book and soon forgot about my friend, their memory like a shadow by my side. And, sure, sure, I forgot about my shadow but my shadow did not forget about me because eleven or so years later in the fall of 2023, my friend called to me from the shelf of a bookstore, reincarnated in a new body.
I bought it in a heartbeat.
I read the first chapters that very night.
And, when I finished chapter nine—the place I left off as a teen—and decided to call it a day for reading… the power at my home went out. No TV. No video games. No power on my laptop to write my book. All I could do was read.
So, I read.
And read.
And read, quickly losing myself in the dark and gothic city of Barcelona, Spain in 1945, and experiencing a world with a new pair of eyes—not a teen but an adult who’s gone through their fair of heartbreak and misery.
I saw my innocence and naivete in Daniel.
My complex, intense, and emotional nature in the author, Julián Carax.
A lost but powerful love of mine in Bea.
And a friend I hope won’t be doomed to misery in Nuria.
Characters…
…That’s what makes The Shadow of the Wind so special. That’s what keeps me up some nights long after I’ve read the book. That’s why I’ll return to this story sometime in the future, something I never do with books. (And read the original version in Spanish! Mamma Mia!)
Carlos Ruiz Zafón bled onto the page when he wrote this bad boy. He put his soul into it. His heart. If there’s any lesson—reminder, really—that I’ve taken from him as an author it’s this: put all of yourself in your book. Be vulnerable. Be real. Bleed.
About the book
I’m not gonna paste the official book description here. Hell, I’m not even going to recite other reviews that focus on the coming-of-age aspect of the story, or how this book will be loved by book lovers. Na, man, I want to focus on a key aspect that is often left out which is: this is a book about lonely people. More precisely, it’s about the miserable nature that seems to sink its claws on adults. (A topic I touch upon in this post.)
In their late 20’s and early 30’s, Julián becomes miserable, and Nuria becomes miserable, developing toxic habits and an even worse prescriptive lens for the world. (I expand on what I mean by prescriptive lens in this post.)
They’re fucked by their past—which I totally understand, it ain’t easy being breezy—and choose to wallow in their misery. I’m not against wallowing, wallowing can be healthy… for a moment. The moment differs from person to person. It could be a day, weeks, months, or even a year, but bruh, it’s a moment.
The problem with Nuria, with people, is that they let that moment go on and on and on, and bam! Twenty years have passed. Thirty. Forty. Bam! You’re eighty years old and full of regret and pain that’ll send you to an earlier grave.
Goddamn, man.
People. The Nuria’s of the world.
I just want to…
You know?
Anyway.
Anyway.
I could go on talking about this beautiful book but I’ll stop here. Initially, I just wanted to share some of my favorite quotes from the book which I’ll paste below but it seems I had a lot more to say about this story than I thought.
Anywho. Here are my favorite quotes in no particular order. Enjoy!
Julian lived in his books… His soul was in his stories. I once asked him who inspired him to create his characters, and his answer was no one. That all his characters were himself. ~ Nuria
… The trouble is that man, going back to Freud—and excuse the metaphor—heats up like a lightbulb: red hot in the twinkling of an eye and cold again in a flash. The female, on the other hand—and this is pure science—heats up like an iron, if you see what I mean. Slowly, over a low heat, like a tasty stew. But then, once she has heated up, there’s no stopping her. Like the steel furnace in Vizcaya. ~ Fermin
Fools talk, cowards are silent, wise men listen ~ Barcelo
Television, my dear Daniel, is the Antichrist, and I can assure you that after only three or four generations, people will no longer even know how to fart on their own and humans will return to living in caves, to medieval savagery, and to the general state of imbecility that slugs overcame back in the Pleistocene era. Our world will not die as a result of the bomb, as the papers say, it will die of laughter, of banality, of making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that. ~ Fermin
Nobody knows much about women, not even Freud, not even women themselves. But it’s like electricity: you don’t have to know how it works to get a shock on the fingers ~ Fermin
Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it’s an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day. ~ Daniel
Look, Daniel. Women, with remarkable exceptions like your neighbor Merceditas, are more intelligent than we are, or at least more honest with themselves about what they want or don’t want. Another question is whether they tell you or the world. You’re facing the enigma of nature, Daniel. Womankind is an indecipherable maze. If you give her time to think, you’re lost. Remember: warm heart, cold mind. The seducer’s code. ~ Fermin
Time goes faster the more hollow it is ~ Nuria
You’re shown a pair of nice boobs and you think you’ve seen Saint Teresa—which at your age can be excused but not cured. Just leave her to me, Daniel. The fragrance of the eternal feminine no longer overpowers me the way it mesmerizes you. At my age the flow of blood to the brain has precedence over that which flows to the loins ~ Fermin
Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it. ~ Fermin
Julian had once told me that a story is a letter the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise. ~ Nuria