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I Maintain the appearance of not being a reader too demanding, because it is the act of reading in itself that I like, and, at the time of picking up a book and open it, and get lost for a while between his pages, floor to enjoy so much of the ritual that involves the reading as the content of each story , which, a priori, hardly me, is unacceptable. My method to discover whether a novel I’ve marked, or not, you lose a little more at the time, is not immediate, and it challenges the forgotten, because memory is the judge more cruel.
This is the reason for my ability to digest, with astonishing agility, and without distinction, best sellers and more literature would be: my filter comes after.
there Are many titles that I open the door, but very few that stay with me ; that I remember and I remember the days of my life in which I read them. However, from minute one in which I discovered the work of Carlos Ruiz Zafón (Barcelona, 1964-Los Angeles, 2020), I knew this was going to go with me for always.
“the shadow of The wind”
it Was 2005, and I, that he was not yet thirty, I had just joined the library of a large area in the center of Madrid. A few weeks working face to the public, the section on the Pocket of those big stores dedicated to the cultural industry , I had enough to know that it had come to my world, that I had found what I wanted to do, despite the fact that the clients, almost without exception, I formulate a unique and monotonous question: When would be the paperback edition of the shadow of The wind? How was it possible that they were delaying so much? That was how I heard about Ruiz Zafón for the first time.
by then, the author, hardened in the field of advertising, he had already won with the Trilogy of the fog to the younger readers -in 1993, The prince of the mist had won the Prize Edebé-, but it was with the publication in 2001 of the shadow of The wind (Planet), a mystery literary set in the Barcelona of the second half of the TWENTIETH century , because of its quality and aura seemed to take over the narrative to The city of wonders (1986, Seix Barral), of Eduardo Mendoza , as won the hearts of the public more adult, accomplishing something very difficult: that those who had read the novel they talk about it and awaken interest in those who do not; the best promotion possible.
“Marina”
Translated into more than fifty languages, and with more than ten million copies sold , a figure, according to his publisher, only surpassed in our language, by Don Quixote of la Mancha and one Hundred years of solitude, the shadow of The wind, the first title of the tetralogy that will complete The game of the Angel (2008, Planet), The prisoner of heaven (2011, Planet), and The maze of the spirits (2016, Planet), took in to have your version in paperback, but I do not took both in to read to Ruiz Zafón, because, azuzada by the curiosity of the readers , on the shelves of my domains in that store immense inhabited by books cheaper, say with the which he himself describes as his most personal work, Navy (1998, Planet), and I could not resist the temptation to immerse myself in a novel that was called like me.
“Marina once told me that you only remember what never happened. Would happen an eternity before it to understand those words. But it is better to start at the beginning, which in this case is the end”. So begins Oscar Drai the story of his incident in the Barcelona of the 1980s; an adventure that, like any good adventure, whether real or literary, is above all a great love story.
When, just a few days ago, I read in the social networks that Carlos Ruiz Zafón had died in Los Angeles cancer victim, I came to the head for the umpteenth time with the beginning of the Navy, and I thought of what will not happen, in his career truncated, but at the same time strangely full and flawless, covered by the passion for the cinema , who took him to live on the other side of the ocean; for the love of a city and to books, a constant in their frames; and for a large army of ghosts , whose presence is crucial it is imperative in the universe of a good writer.
The literature, without the magic, does not exist, and neither exists without the actual lives of those who read and accept the fiction to take root in their routines more gray, which distinguishes them, etiquetándolas to rememorarlas some day. That’s why for me there will always be a time bound manner indissoluble in the shadow of The wind and Marine; the test is a blatant, that the natural connection between the truth and lies , that a novel has fulfilled its mission.
I said: I will remember always.
And I know that I am not the only one.
