Bookraft

Imagine writing a Romance novel set in Barcelona, but really situated for story and repressive mood in Franco's Spain of the 1930's to the early 1950's. The story is about a writer, Julian Xarax, and his seemingly lost set of novels that are not popular except with the literary community. Daniel Sempere is taken by his bookseller father to The Cemetery of Forgotten Books where he is to select one book from the many thousands which he must "adopt," and promise "that it will never disappear, that it will always stay alive." Daniel selects Julian Xarax's Shadow of the Wind. Truly a literary endeavor and the start of a Mystery-Romance in which Daniel feels compelled to find out more about Julian Xarax despite a)the fact that he discovers that someone is destroying and burning all the copies of Xarax's novels [less than 2000] not just in Barcelona but in Western Europe and b)some of the tough Francoist police start warning him off the case.

And as the mystery unfolds, Daniel finds that he is repeating in his own unfolding romance many of the events that are depicted in the novel he chose - Shadow of the Wind. And so a story within a story unfolds in quirky not quite parallels. The essence is that crime and corruption have a way of festering and taking victims - many years after the principal events. Truly the stains and stress fractures of Franco Spain run in crazed fashion throughout the novel [and one can sense the parallels with the modern day Basque terror that infects Barcelona and Northeastern Spain].

The richness of the writing certainly comes through in the reading. But Orion Audiobooks has done something that I have never heard before - embellished the beggining and the ending of key passages with musical fade-ins and fade outs. It has a slight, the Edge of Night Soap Opera effect, but does not detract too much from the superior reading by James Wilby. There are times when the illogic of our hero, Daniel, actually grates - but both the mystery and the romance more than pull one along for a fine, almost Dickensian tale [it certainly has Dicken's richness of characters] ... if that can be said about a slice of Franco Splattered Spain.