Carlos Ruiz Zafón's novel about Barcelona during the Franco regime has made him a huge success in his homeland, writes Shane Hegarty
Carlos Ruiz Zafón turned on his television recently to find just how popular his The Shadow of the Wind has become in Spain. When King Juan Carlos recently launched the Madrid book fair, this was the book he chose to bring home with him. The joke on television that night was the King was the last person in Spain not to have already read it.
"I'm one of the lucky writers who's been able to see that what you put in a book has been received by the readers and praised by them," says Zafón of his success. "That's almost always impossible. You might see it on a very small scale, but on such a big one." The novel tells the story of a young Barcelona boy during the Franco years who is introduced to The Cemetery of Forgotten Books by his father, a bookseller. He chooses a work by an author called Julian Carax and is captivated by both the tale and the writer, who years earlier vanished in strange circumstances, leaving behind few copies of his works. A mystery develops in which the boy's life begins to imitate certain aspects of this book, while his interest in Carax attracts the unwanted attentions of the police. It is multi-layered and multi-textual, but it is also a beautifully written literary thriller that fairly rattles along. He believes its success has come in how readers have found what they wanted in it.
"The ingredients or elements or themes are not the thing. The reader is aware of them, but I think that at the end of the day it's the narrative and the way the story is told. Of course, the story can be told in a way that gets inside of us, and gets you thinking about these things." It has been published in 20 countries, becoming a bestseller in Germany and Norway, and now finding its way into the English language through a translation by Lucia Graves (daughter of Robert Graves). It has received fine reviews. "Each might find different things in it. America is extremely insulated from the rest of the world, this self-contained universe, as opposed to Europe where, in a way, we know each other. But in America they don't know this or care. So it's interesting to see how they react to a story about a place they have no idea about. Yet, they read it because I think readers all over are the same kind of people. There are historical references. There are a lot of literary references, so that it's almost a game. Some people find things in it. But if you don't find anything, it doesn't matter. It's only an additional layer of enjoyment." So, The Shadow of the Wind is an expert thriller, but it is interested in the way in which the past is forgotten or simply wiped out - issues of continued relevance in Spain.
"What has happened is that 20th- century history in Spain has a peculiar gap. The rest of Europe went through the rise and fall of fascism and the destruction of war, and then moved on from that, and in a way it evolved as the blocks that were Western Europe and Eastern Europe. But Spain remained insulated. For 40 years Spain was living in this kind of wonderland, where the regime was getting softer and softer and it was just languishing away. So the first few years were terrible. There was retribution and a lot of killing and the people in prison. But as it went on there was nobody left to kill or put in prison. It was just going to sleep. And at some point it woke up all of a sudden and the change was fast and radical.
"It created a sense of a need to move forward and to ignore the post-war years. It happened a lot in Germany, in that it's only now that some effects of the bombings of the cities are being studied and mentioned. It was almost apocalyptic, the destruction of Nazi Germany, so that for a while nobody would talk about it, they would say let's move on. And now, some are saying let's talk about this. And I feel in Spain that happened. You go to Barcelona, and of course it is now this fashionable clubby place, but it was never like that before. Spain was not always this fiesta place. And there's a feeling, perhaps, about a need to understand and analyse where we came from. Everything that happens today had a relation to the civil war and what led up to it and what followed. And I think now you have a new generation dealing with that." The Barcelona of his novel is certainly not the sunny, hip city familiar to millions of tourists, but a grim, rundown city suffocated by dictatorship. For the 39-year-old Zafón, that's closer to the city he knew as a boy, and the one from which he always wanted to escape.
When he left, he ended up in Los Angeles. "I think in my case because I was living in the United States that I got a sense of the destruction of history around you. It's almost like an industry, this destruction of memory. It's very interesting, especially coming from Western Europe where the weight of history, even if it's not mentioned, is strong. You might know nothing about a place, but if you walk there you can sense it, you know something has happened here. America is not like that.
"Los Angeles is a place of re-invention, where it looks like everything was built ten minutes ago. It's a very old city, but it's in the nature to reinvent. You see buildings disappear, but you cannot remember what was there before it. So maybe it made me consider these things a lot."
He was screen-writer in LA, rewriting scripts before they were passed on to others who would rewrite it again. It helped his writing, which is filmic and economic, but never lazy. But it did his spirits no good. "The minute you start working on something you know you're going to be fired at some point. You're not working on something new, but something that's been going around, sometimes for years. Then you walk in on maybe the tenth rewrite. And they want a new direction. This was about the life of St Francis in the first draft now it's a musical set in Las Vegas. They tell you it's fantastic and then they fire you and it goes to someone else."
Then, one day four years ago, he begged to be fired. "I saw the light, I thought I didn't want to do this anymore," he recalls. "At some point I realised that five or six years had passed. The thing about Los Angeles is that the sun is always shining, and time passes much faster than any other place I've been in. And it's scary, because you wake up and realise all this time has passed." He found himself working on another flailing script. "It was originally a turn-of-the-century melodrama. Then they wanted to turn it into a Merchant Ivory thing. The producer said: 'I want a movie in which nothing happens, where you have people sitting in a room looking at a cup of tea.' So I said: 'That's it, fire me now.' "
He set to work on The Shadow of the Wind. At that point, Zafón was already a successful writer of young adult fiction, but this was a new departure for him. However, the book was no overnight success. It became a cult favourite first, before the influential newspapers La Guardia and ABC began to champion it. "Then booksellers took it on, telling people: 'If you don't like it, bring it back. But trust me.' I don't know what it is. People didn't want to put it on the shelf, but to share it on, to tell friends."
He is working on a second novel, one of a further three that he says will stem indirectly from The Shadow of the Wind. This novel, though, will be set in late 19th-century Barcelona; a city of violence and conflict far removed from the "interesting kind of mirage" he believes the city has become in recent years.
"This is stuff that gets forgotten in this modern day Benetton and Hard Rock Café Barcelona," he says.
Nevertheless, he now owns a home there, although he prefers Los Angeles, where he can escape from his new-found fame.
"You become part of the decoration, and they feel they own a piece of you. And, I don't know, I'm not an especially sociable character, so after a while I get tired of that. I like to be alone and after awhile I say I want to get out of here. Los Angeles is a big nowhere, where it's very easy to disappear. You can do whatever you want. I find it good."
The Shadow of the Wind is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, priced £12.99