Author: Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Year: 2004 (2001)
Publisher: Phoenix
Language: English (translator Lucia Graves)
Carlos Ruiz
Zafón’s novel “The Shadow of the Wind” is by any definition a wonderous and
pleasant read. The writer takes the reader gently by the hand and carefully
leads them into the world of intrigue, wonder, love, and friendship. But more
than a novel, it is an elegant instrument in the disciplinary order of memory,
literature, and identity. It is not simply a narrative about forgotten books
and troubled writers, but a study of the circulation of power through language,
bodies, and historical discourse. “The archive” as Michel Foucault would put it.
Beneath its seductive aesthetics lies a matrix of panopticon and confession,
wherein the subject is formed not through autonomy but through the interiorisation
of surveillance and the repetition of fate as the narrative form.
The story
is set in Barcelona shortly after the war as Francisco Franco’s falangist
regime is still reeling from the post-war isolation and responding, as dictators
do, with tightened control and brutal oppression. The protagonist Daniel Sempere
follows his father to a place in Barcelona which even to the Barcelonians is
mostly unknown: The Cemetery of Forgotten Books. Daniel is encouraged to pick
out a book and become its guardian. He picks “The Shadow of the Wind” by Julian
Carax, a name of whom he had thitherto been completely oblivious. Or rather, it
picks him. Daniel’s relationship with the book, and his relentless search for its
elusive author, will come to define his fate.
At the centre
of Zafón’s novel is the relationship triangle between Daniel Sempere, Julian
Carax, and Inspector Fumero within a closed system of power. The narrative
traces Daniel’s gradual descent into the life of Carax, but it is not simply
the tale of a reader discovering a writer. It is the slow process by which
Daniel is made intelligible as a subject through pursuit, confession, and
surveillance under the persistent gaze of Fumero, the novel’s repressive figure
of formal authority and informal malice.
Carax’ role
in the novel less that of a living being as that of a dossier to be
reconstructed through fragments, testimonies, and deduction. His life is
retrieved through the operations of the archive, and his identity is
constituted through gossip, rumours, letters, and third-party accounts
I could not
help but read this novel through the lens of Michel Foucault’s power analysis,
particularly as outlined in his groundbreaking book “Discipline and Punish”.
Foucault names the shift from act to document as a crucial feature of
disciplinary power, and Carax is the prototype: not a man, but a readable
subject whose every gesture is translated into signs of deviance or resistance.
For a relentless oppressor, every liberal act will look like insubordination. To
a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Daniel, in seeking to uncover Carax,
gradually assumes his narrative coordinates, becoming an object of observation
himself. First for the reader. Then for Inspector Fumero.
The sadistic
Inspector Fumero functions as the visible face of disciplinary violence. He is
not merely a villain, but the embodiment of sovereign and bureaucratic power
entwined—a fusion of spectacle and surveillance. Like the Foucaultian executioner-turned-warden,
Fumero is a relic of an older, bloodier regime of control who nevertheless
adapts seamlessly to the more modern modes of tracking and silencing
dissidence. His obsession with Carax and, by extension, with Daniel, is not
driven by personal vendetta alone, but by the imperative to restore narrative
closure, to erase anomaly, to close the gap between deviance and punishment.
In this
respect, Fumero finds a soulmate in Victor Hugo’s Javert from “Les Misérables”
(see review from September 2022), who puts all original thinking and feelings aside
in favour of becoming a dispassionate tool in the service of the system. Unlike
Javert however, who submitted completely to the system and equated his personal
value with it, Fumero makes the system a tool for his own personal campaign of
vengeance and hatred.
In this
triangular structure, Daniel becomes the hinge on which the door between the
past grievance that pits Julian Carax and Inspector Fumero against each other,
and the final showdown in the post-war present swings. Through his pursuit of
Carax, he does not merely learn a hidden history; he is inserted into a chain
of substitution. His desire to know becomes indistinguishable from the
mechanisms of control that produced Carax’s erasure. That Fumero begins to
pursue Daniel with the same fervour once reserved for Carax is no accident. Penelope
Aldaya and Beatriz Aguilar, the love interests of Julian Carax and Daniel
Sempere respectively, embody the parallelism between the two men, separated by
generations yet united by discursive and biographical repetition.
This is why
the novel’s long expository chapters, usually delivered through rather verbose confessions,
feel less like storytelling and more like processing. The characters recount
their pasts not as memory but as evidence. Structured, ordered, and precise.
These passages resemble info-dumps more than literary flow, and to me
manifest the transition from personal fate to archive. Zafón's narrative, as
Foucault predicts, for all its emotional resonance, cannot escape the form of
the report or the disciplinary file.
“The Shadow
of the Wind” can, or maybe even must, be read in light of these mechanisms.
