The Catalan novelist tells Christian House about the inspiration for the Cemetery of Forgotten Books - The Independent, Sunday 24 June, 2012
The Covent Garden Hotel off Seven Dials, London's 17th-century junction, is a fitting location in which to meet the perpetually inquisitive Carlos Ruiz Zafón. "The stranger who finds himself in the Dials for the first time," wrote Charles Dickens in Sketches by Boz, "at the entrance of seven obscure passages, uncertain which to take, will see enough around him to keep his curiosity awake for no inconsiderable time."
Ruiz Zafón is no stranger to the allure of eerie alleys. In his bestseller
The Shadow of the Wind, the master of Catalan gothic seized upon the
seductive, sinister nature of Barcelona's maze of avenues and plazas during the
chaos of the Spanish Civil War and its Francoist hangover. The Prisoner of
Heaven, the third in a projected quartet of tales set around the city's
mythical literary haven of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, is now being
published in English.
We settle into the hushed cocoon of the hotel's drawing room, where Ruiz Zafón cuts a gently commanding figure. He's a great bear of a man with a neat goatee and a voice lazing half way between Beverly Hills and the Ramblas of Barcelona. He's the physical opposite of Fermin Romero de Torres, the beanpole hero of The Prisoner of Heaven. Fermin is the skinny bookseller at Sempere and Sons, purveyors of fine volumes; a romantic with a quickstep wit and tango libido. Held in Montjuic castle by Franco's goons, his period of captivity holds the key to earlier mysteries and future retribution.
"What I want is that these stories are arranged as a labyrinth with different points of entry," says Ruiz Zafón. The four quarters that make up this "Chinese box of fictions" each possess a different tone, a different texture, and this is Fermin's tale. "He's always been the moral centre of the stories. He's the guy who holds the truth in his hands. Fermin is also in many ways an homage to the picaresque tradition of Spanish literature. He's been holding a secret which can take us to the heart of this labyrinth."
While his books are immersed in Spain's second city, Ruiz Zafón has lived in Los Angeles for nearly two decades. His Californian lifestyle might seem at odds with the setting of his novels but his prose style has the rattling patter of West Coast authors such as Raymond Chandler. "I always had this childhood image in the back of my mind of this fantastic place where all the things I liked came from; Orson Welles, jazz, all that stuff. Los Angeles is one of those places where somebodies become nobodies and nobodies become somebody," he says. "In Los Angeles you get the sense sometimes that there's a mysterious patrol at night: when the streets are empty and everyone's asleep, they go erasing the past. It's like a bad Ray Bradbury story – 'The Memory Erasers'."
His home town is somewhat different. "The haunting of history is ever present in Barcelona," says Ruiz Zafón. "I see cities as organisms, as living creatures. To me Madrid is a man and Barcelona is a woman. And it's a woman who's extremely vain. One of the great Catalan poets, Joan Maragall, wrote this famous poem in which he called Barcelona the great enchantress, or some kind of sorceress, and in which the city has this dark enticing presence that seduces and lures people. I think Barcelona has a lot of that." In Ruiz Zafón's novels, Barcelona is as enthralling a character as Dickens's London or Isherwood's Berlin.
The full piece at The Independent.
We settle into the hushed cocoon of the hotel's drawing room, where Ruiz Zafón cuts a gently commanding figure. He's a great bear of a man with a neat goatee and a voice lazing half way between Beverly Hills and the Ramblas of Barcelona. He's the physical opposite of Fermin Romero de Torres, the beanpole hero of The Prisoner of Heaven. Fermin is the skinny bookseller at Sempere and Sons, purveyors of fine volumes; a romantic with a quickstep wit and tango libido. Held in Montjuic castle by Franco's goons, his period of captivity holds the key to earlier mysteries and future retribution.
"What I want is that these stories are arranged as a labyrinth with different points of entry," says Ruiz Zafón. The four quarters that make up this "Chinese box of fictions" each possess a different tone, a different texture, and this is Fermin's tale. "He's always been the moral centre of the stories. He's the guy who holds the truth in his hands. Fermin is also in many ways an homage to the picaresque tradition of Spanish literature. He's been holding a secret which can take us to the heart of this labyrinth."
While his books are immersed in Spain's second city, Ruiz Zafón has lived in Los Angeles for nearly two decades. His Californian lifestyle might seem at odds with the setting of his novels but his prose style has the rattling patter of West Coast authors such as Raymond Chandler. "I always had this childhood image in the back of my mind of this fantastic place where all the things I liked came from; Orson Welles, jazz, all that stuff. Los Angeles is one of those places where somebodies become nobodies and nobodies become somebody," he says. "In Los Angeles you get the sense sometimes that there's a mysterious patrol at night: when the streets are empty and everyone's asleep, they go erasing the past. It's like a bad Ray Bradbury story – 'The Memory Erasers'."
His home town is somewhat different. "The haunting of history is ever present in Barcelona," says Ruiz Zafón. "I see cities as organisms, as living creatures. To me Madrid is a man and Barcelona is a woman. And it's a woman who's extremely vain. One of the great Catalan poets, Joan Maragall, wrote this famous poem in which he called Barcelona the great enchantress, or some kind of sorceress, and in which the city has this dark enticing presence that seduces and lures people. I think Barcelona has a lot of that." In Ruiz Zafón's novels, Barcelona is as enthralling a character as Dickens's London or Isherwood's Berlin.
The full piece at The Independent.
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