The Shadow of the Wind is a story about a book – and the son of a book salesman.  In America where we have bookstores on every corner, this story might not seem interesting.  But life for the patrons of the arts in Franco’s Spain was fraught with peril.  Dictators generally lack sophistication and are intimidated by what they do not understand.  Blood they have no problem with, it is ink they fear.  The plot of the story is about love and the human condition, about a boy making his way to manhood in perilous times.  But a boy before all.  Those of us who have been boys will understand and smile at the struggles and frustrations; with the agony of new love and the impatient desperation of its whispered word. 

Like with all good fiction, the end might surprise; and Zafon is confident enough to tell the story the way he felt he needed to, not the way we hope it would go.  That is also an aftereffect of the Franco days; the Hollywood ending that Americans love so much is seldom present in Spanish literature and art – it does not do honor and justice to those who suffered. 

Read this book, and see if you also take out if it what you brought to it in the first place.  

Joel D. Hirst is a novelist, author of “The Lieutenant of San Porfirio” – and its Spanish version “El Teniente de San Porfirio: Cronica de una Revolucion Bolivariana”.