Book 2

Second completed book of the New Year. I am in quiet competition to read more this year than my mother--who is retired (her favor), but very busy (my favor), but a blindingly fast reader (she'll probably beat me).



This week it was Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind. It's a good story. A page turner. Am glad to have read a novel set in post-WWII Franco Spain--feel like I have a better sense of that time period. But I hate to say that even though I liked the book, I couldn't shake the feeling that the writing felt sloppy. It felt like a narrative trying to take on both the magic and beautiful formality of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It hits the magic, but trips up on the formality--letting a kind of modern day vulgarity of language slip in from time to time, so that it neither feels like a piece from the 50's or the 30's. . . or even the 60's where it ends up. And it has very strange point of view problems that tripped me up repeatedly. A writer can't just put something in italics to explain a shift of narrative voice within the context of letter that one character has written another. It's a lazy convention.

This sounds like I wouldn't recommend it, but I would. It's an interesting story and a decent read, it was just a bit less than I was expecting.