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.

Book Review | 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

There comes a time in every reader’s life when they are sorely tempted to club their favourite author on the head. With their own book, no less.

My turn came very recently with Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 which I attempted to romance over a course of 3 months. Forget that this book, desperately trying to be his “magnum opus”, is over 1300 pages long (in paperback) and that it could have done away with at least 1000 pages (the person who edited this book needs a tight slap too); 1Q84 is printed proof that Murakami is officially too full of himself (to put it mildly)!

In the year 1984, we read into a world within a world in Tokyo, Japan. This world has two moons, something the author can’t reiterate enough, Little People, a cult organisation functioning under the guise of an organic farm and two protagonists whose fates are intertwined by a series of parallel events.

1Q84 is told from two perspectives – Tengo, a Math teacher who moonlights as a writer, and Aomame, a martial arts instructor moonlighting as an assassin. It gets off to a promising start. Tengo is commissioned to rewrite a novel for an inarticulate 17-year-old with a shady past, we’re intrigued already. On the other side of town, Aomame is commissioned to kill Leader (with a capital ‘L’), head of Sakigake, the organic farm disguised as a cult. Some 500 pages in, we’re about to give up, when we realise that Tengo and Aomame have a shared moment from when they briefly went to school together. The two, in fact, are in love with each other’s 12-year-old selves. How romantic! Suddenly, the book has intrigue, mystery and a fatalistic love story that could go either way. Heck, even the two worlds, two moons and the two lives of our two protagonists gain literary momentum.

But another 300 pages in (that’s nearing 900 pages, with 400 to go) we reach, are dragged more like, to a climatic scene where Aomame finally meets this Leader, the chief antagonist of the novel whom you fear and loathe just a little less than Johnny Walker in Kafka on the Shore. A few too many pages of philosophy and un-gasp-worthy revelations in, Aomame “sends him to the other world”; simultaneously, Tengo is the subject of a really weird exchange with the 17-year-old monosyllabic writer whose work he rewrote and you suddenly realise, as a reader, you just…don’t…care…anymore!

Murakami was and still is one of my favourite authors. Kafka blew my mind, while After Dark converted me to Magic Realism. I even started off the New Year resolving to read each and every work published by Murakami!

But 1Q84 has taught me something very elementary about literature and the authors we idolise. They’re not golden geese. Every book of theirs cannot be a work of genius. I experienced this revelation for the first time with Carlos Ruiz Zaffon – loved Shadow of the Wind and The Prince of Mist, hated The Angel’s Game. But I dismissed that as the folly of a writer attempting to promise more mystery and mind blowing awesomeness than his story-telling skills could cope with. But now, with Murakami, I see this very mortal mistake at play once again.

1Q84 was destined for greatness. But it fails because of sheer volume and the author’s need to state, restate and reiterate facts, details and flashbacks he’s already tackled. It’s a waste of a story that could have blown your mind in 500 pages but instead, is stretched out to ridiculous proportions just so one man can have his giant ego printed across 1300 pages (in paperback).

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.