La Sombra del Viento

Long Book, but Worth the Effort

I've never read anything quite like this book. It feels almost like a collection of interconnected novels, each one told from a different perspective or timeframe, each one adding more to the story and unraveling more of the mystery. It's extremely well done and I'll definitely be continuing the series at some point. It's absolutely worth your time, but keep in mind that this is one of Ruiz Zafón's "adult" novels and it deals with some dark themes.

At its heart, this is a mystery novel, which is great for language learning, since it naturally pushes you to keep reading to see how everything resolves. There are also suspense, romance, and even gripping action elements (I could easily see portions being adapted into a graphic novel). Ruiz Zafón pushes the boundaries of word meanings at times, giving extremely imaginative descriptions of events and settings, and is also prone to launching into long, flowery passages, which ups the difficulty, but I wouldn't say it's overwhelming for lower advanced students. Many advanced words recur throughout the book, which was great for picking them up naturally.

Its difficulty is deceptive: I often found myself going pages without looking anything up, only to get stuck on a page looking up every other word. Most of the challenge comes from the dialogues, with each character having a unique voice, and some using extremely affected or colloquial speech (Fermín and Don Anacleto being the worst offenders, others to a lesser extent). Something also has to be said for the length (it's long!), which is why this book ranks harder than otherwise denser novelas and short novels. Ruiz Zafón also has a habit of slightly altering proverbs and fixed expressions and substituting unexpected words. Here are just a couple of examples (among many): https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/vestido-de-jueves.1185090/ https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/aquellos-a-quien-necesita-amar-son-s%C3%B3lo-sombras.4065954/

I also just want to say that this book is not "sexist." Near the end of the book a character does have to deal with a sexist environment, but it's portrayed as something that's obviously immoral and is pivotal to the plot, not just thrown in on a whim. Everything else seems completely normal to me, given the time and setting, so I was really stumped by seeing the other review. Giving one star to this book because of that, especially when the reviewer didn't even finish the book and also gave a different book a perfect score, despite it containing (and I quote): "disturbing visions, violence, death, decomposing bodies, zombies, abortion, miscarriage, child death, alcohol, gods, cannibalism, predatory behaviour, incest, child abuse, sexual abuse, drugs, domestic violence, satanism, satanic sex/bestiality?/dead body parts/please erase my brain, homophobia, angels, furries eating ass, hell," is that absolute most absurd thing I've ever seen in a review.