Ruiz Carlos Zafòn

The setting is Barcelona during Franco's Spain, in the 1950s. The son of a bookseller is taken by his father (a dealer in antiquarian and rare books) to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a repository for all those volumes no one will ever seek out. Here, the boy picks up a novel by a Spanish author. Reading it draws him into a sequence of events that unfolds across his youth, in a sort of parallel narrative: the tribulations that engulfed the author's life (betrayed friendship, love for a girl who turns out to be his sister, her death, and ultimately persecution by a former friend turned brutal police officer) seem to recur in the boy's own existence. The young man gradually uncovers what happened to the author, finds himself similarly hounded by a vicious policeman, and seems destined to lose the woman he loves, just as the writer did. The book concludes with a happy ending: the villain is killed and the young man is free to marry. The opening of the tale seems intriguing, with this premise of forgotten books heralding a plot woven between the mysterious allure of books and the discovery of the life that lies behind the author and the stories told. Yet this promising start is lost in a plot that grows increasingly predictable, where the constant reliance on “telling” (characters recalling episodes from the author’s life) renders the book verbose and often tedious. As so often happens, the novel is too long, overloaded with themes and characters (frequently superfluous to the narrative), and provides far too little sense of place. The result is a touch of boredom.