Review | Marina by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Some spoilers included. #JustSaying

Carlos Ruiz Zafon is a sculptor of antagonists. Demonic, degenerate and devoid of humanity, these are the creatures you can only imagine encountering in hell or worse, in a nightmare that has demons crawling across the walls and ceiling.

The scariest is Mr Cain, a magician/clown/maker of deals from The Prince of Mist. It may have something to do with his insane pursuit for his pound of flesh or the fact that he often appears from – wait for it – mist.

Then there’s Lain Coubert from The Shadow of the Wind, a disfigured creature with neither eyelids nor lips who carries the smell of burnt paper everywhere he goes.

And now in Marina, his latest book in translation, Zafon has outdone himself with Mijail Kolvenik, born in the tunnels of Prague, raised in the operating room of his adoptive father, a doctor and now, obsessed with cheating death even if it means stalking children with his claw-like hands and feeding off his own young. You’d be wise to avoid tunnels, dark alleys and abandoned Gothic structures for a while after reading this book.

One can’t deny that Zafon has a special gift with antagonists. Now if only he focused as much time and effort on his protagonists.

Marina is about a boy named Oscar who lives in a boarding school in Barcelona. This school obviously has really lax rules because all Oscar seems to do is leave the premises after class every day and explore the dark streets of the city. Fascinating and wondrous, he soon encounters a rambling house one evening and finds himself mesmerised by its occupants, a one-time famous painter named German and his daughter Marina.

The girl quickly becomes the object of his affection though she responds to his advances in hot and cold bursts until she breaks his heart. The similarities between Pip and Estella from Great Expectations are uncanny but without the breathless charm. Moreover, this isn’t a story about adolescent love even though Zafon hints at its significance through mysterious illnesses, an oscillation between optimism and depression and a bit of stalking, on Oscar’s part, even the occupants of the house are clearly not at home.

The real truly story starts with the discovery of an unnamed grave in a secret cemetery and a veiled woman who visits it on the last Sunday of every month. On following her the kids find themselves ensnared in a mystery that revolves around Mijail Kolvenik, a man who made a fortune in mechanised prosthetic limbs during the war. But as with all good things this too ends in tragedy with nothing to show for it except a demonic new avatar that wants nothing more than to replace every part of himself in order to live forever.

Zafon’s a master of the sinister novel. His descriptions of situations, places and people transcend language. But at some point he started to lose the plot… literally. In Marina, it’s as though he’s confused between focussing on the best story he’s ever written and the chemistry between these two stupid kids – I mean, who returns to a warehouse filled with mysterious life sized puppets dangling from ropes on the ceiling? A strong indication of this is how he’s titled the book – Marina – rather than the choicer ones that hint at mysterious characters – The Prisoner of Heaven, The Water in the Shadows, The Prince of Mist…

I’m not a big fan of forced emotional scenes. Especially those that are drawn out for pages and pages well after the story has ended. Zafon claims that Marina is one of his favourite books among all his titles. I really can’t see why. Neither story, the forced one featuring Oscar and Marina or the more absorbing one of Mijail and Irene, satisfy Zafon fans sufficiently. He should have sent Marina to where it really belongs – The Cemetery of Forgotten Books.

The Reality of Magic

A still from Pan's Labyrinth, directed Guillermo del Toro.
One of my favourite movies for the genre -- recommended
for those who dislike its use in books.

It's easy to imagine worlds from scratch. It's easier still to see what will be, judging by how things are now. But to blend into a setting and imagine things for what they could be, but don't reveal, is what brings magic realism to life.

Our book club is reading The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafaq this month. It was picked from a coffee cup that also held Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Swimming by Nicola Keegan. Two excellent titles recommended by members who have read, loved and wouldn't mind picking them up again. That's the new rule... eliminates disasters such as the last one when none of us could get beyond four pages of the first chapter. Thanks for Cloud Atlas Mr Mitchell... not really...

Admittedly, I am partial to the genre of magic realism. I don't know how to justify this affliction except to say it's because "what exists isn't, and what isn't, is". Know what I mean?

I started my affair with the genre when I read and loved Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind. There was something so eerie about Lain Coubert's introduction in the novel that I found it hard to put down thereon. He stands in the shadows under our protagonist's house, not a a distinctive feature to be put into words, except the smell of burning books that engulf his wake. I don't think the author put it in there, but in my mind' eye, the minute it is revealed that Courbert is a character from the author, Julian Carax's book, and a sinister one no less -- the devil -- I could just picture a little red tail creeping out of his overcoat, warning you to get out of his way, or provoking you to come just a little closer.

I discovered Murakami's Kafka on the Shore a few months after The Shadow of the Wind. It wasn't an easy read at first. The multiple story-lines, parallel only if you are patient enough to get through the initial confusion, didn't appeal to me at first. But I head on the minute Nakata waltzed into conversation with a lost cat. I also found Johnny Walker quite interesting. Another character, much like Coubert, who has a sinister air about him. Do all magic realists stun their audience to attention with characters such as these? They're so psychotic you hope they aren't real. But to get into this genre you have to make a choice to believe or disbelieve, go by face value -- something that isn't easy since their faces, being of no consequence, are rarely given much character. I also think that's what defines how badly they can infest your dreams.

Lucky then, there isn't an antagonist in The Bastard of Istanbul. But there is a djinn -- the dark one, one enjoys his role as the bearer of bad news: He's called Mr Bitter. He isn't evil, nor does he have a hidden agenda. But he does have the power to tear away a layer of skin (metaphorically) to reveal that which is buried, and painful as it is, needs to be unearthed. I won't ruin this book for my fellow Caterpillars. All I can say is I hope, sincerely, that they enjoy the book as much as I did. Magic realism is for everyone. The only trick is to decide whether you're up for looking at the real world with a hint of magic.

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The Sequel to a Prequel | The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

The Angel’s Game was written with a muddled mind as though Carlos Ruiz Zafon was at war with himself throughout the process. With characters that are neither here nor there it leaves you hanging till the end wondering which ones will be most paramount to the novel.

Divided into three ‘Books’ – City of the Damned, Lux Aeterna and The Angel’s Game – Zafon’s prequel to The Shadow of the Wind, is narrated in first person. The story revolves around an orphaned writer named David Martin who writes a series of raunchy thrillers called City of the Damned. Painted with a colourful imagination and figures of speech that audible and visual at the same time, the novel starts off with great promise. Martin moves into a tower house abandoned for years that hints at a mystery after the demise of the previous owners. Here he spends his days locked away, writing, by his estimate, 6.66 pages a day to fulfill his quota of for 200 pages of the manuscript he must deliver to his slave driving publishers every month. But things go awry for young Martin when his health suffers from being over worked not to mention helping out his mentor and benefactor, Don Pedro Vidal, while facing a crisis of in executing his own novel.

Soon, worked to the bone Martin finds he has only a short while to live due to a tumor (how very Bollywood of you Mr Zafon) lodged in his brain. But the book suddenly takes a Hollywood twist when a mysterious publisher of religious texts from France gets in touch with him to write a book in exchange for 100,000 francs and a Faustian pact that will fulfill his heart’s desire. What follows is an attempt at cracking the mystery of the previous owner who, it’s hinted, has a lot more in common with Martin than he first thought.

"Sit and squeeze your brain until it hurts," says our Martin to his apprentice Isabella about the art of writing. It would seem that Mr Zafon has done the same – perhaps adding conversations he was having inside his own head to the dialogue between the characters. Unfortunately, the book has too many plot lines running through it to do any one justice. It could have made a good mystery that our professional-writer-turned-amateur-detective must crack. It could have also been a focused thesis on the process of writing and deriving inspiration by, as it mentions, squeezing your brain until it hurts. At points it borders dangerously on being a novel about the root of religious beliefs and their influence on society through the ages. But by no means is it one complete book that serves its purpose of being a satisfying read by an author with the power to chill you to the bone.

When we put Carlos Ruiz Zafon in the spotlight on his blog around a year ago, I had mentioned only that it had disappointed me immensely. But I recently decided to force myself to attempt it again because a sequel to the sequel written before the prequel is scheduled to release in English. And while I’m still looking forward to The Prisoner of Heaven (due to release sometime in July), I wish Zafon would have taken his own advice and sat his ass down to concentrate on one good book instead of creating a confluence of dreams, inspiration and, can’t grudge him this as an aspiring writer, the process of writing a novel.

You can’t always create a masterpiece. But when you’ve got a potential bestseller on your hands, I do believe that you have a duty to your loyalists. But with critical acclaim comes pressure. And with pressure comes a work like The Angel’s Game, that finds its talented and imaginative author trying hard to repeat with greater magnitude what he did with The Shadow of the Wind with disastrous results.

A Magic Realist | Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Sorry for going MIA last week. I'm grateful to Reshma for holding the fort around here while I was off reading press releases on tiny-ass stools I had to share with three big bums (mine included). But since I'm back to the grind now, I can't put this off any longer lest my blogging buddy devours my liver for dinner tonight. So here goes...

I didn't discover Carlos Ruiz Zafon. He was sort of bestowed upon me one cold snowy Christmas a few years ago. Little did I know, after reading the synopsis of The Shadow of the Wind, that this Spanish Magic Realist in translation would become one of my favourite authors of all time.

Set in Barcelona after the Spanish Civil War, The Shadow of the Wind is a book within the book written by one Julián Carax. The story captivates the imagination of a young man named Daniel Sempere making him want to find more titles by the author. But this quest turns to dust almost instantly when he finds out that all the titles written by Carax were bought and burned by a mysterious man calling himself Lain Coubert, a character in Carax's novel who is the devil. Not one to give up easily, he uses the priviledge of having a lot of spare time and solves the mystery of Carax's missing books, his untimely death and a sinister secret buried deep in the darkest crevices of Barcelona.

The Shadow of the Wind is Zafon's best novel yet. With great story-telling and plot lines that make it impossible to put down, I recall finishing the book and then starting it again almost instantly. A great first sign. But not for long.

The thing is all of Zafon's books follow a similar pattern - the protagonists are young men, neither too rich nor poor, who come across a cloaked stranger giving them the heebie-jeebies. Throw in some strong and appealing female characters and a mystery that keeps you hooked until the end only because no one is willing to tell the whole truth without resorting to lying, and you have a plot that's not predictable, but not entirely original either.

The Angel's Game, a book I swept through shelves to find, disappointed me beyond belief. The Prince of Mist, managed to give me a sleepless night of watching the cupboard, but riddled itself with flaws in the end (in it's defense, it is a "horror young adult" novel). A preview of The Midnight Palace, another young adult novel most recently translated, was delivered to me via a Kindle. The monotony, quite like his previous works, almost killed me.

But Zafon is still my favourite writer. You have to admit - he has style and he has imagination, two very important traits of any good story-teller. What's more is that of all the authors of magic realism, he's the easiest to breeze through.

His prose is lyrical, almost poetic with something fatalistic about it. "He would always remember..." "... the first sparks of an electric storm crackled across the sky like a string of bright lights."

Unlike Gabriel Garcia Marquez, his stories don't ride into numerous decades, introducing a wide variety of characters you have trouble remembering. Unlike Rushdie, he uses shorter sentences. And unlike Murakami, his stories don't sound like adventures on acid. Zafon keeps it simple by limiting the number of primary characters and exploring a form of magic that's as familiar, yet unnerving as a carnival of characters.

He isn't the best in the genre though, considering he's dabbling in a form of story-telling where imagination is the limit. But he's my go-to guy. A sort of comforter I revisit every time I'm ill or sad. His prose makes for good friend to turn to when you want to forget, if only for just a minute.

I lost The Shadow of the Wind (my greatest regret to date). The Angel's Game and The Prince of Mist are up for grabs though, so feel free to get in touch.