If you loved Fermin and his salacious one-liners, you're in for a treat. You'll also love the way Zafon ties in characters and events from both TSOTW and The Angel's Game. We revisit Beatriz, Bernarda, David Martin, and the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. We even get to learn a little more about Daniel Sempere's mother, Isabella, who died when Daniel was small. That year at Christmas time, every morning dawned laced with frost under leaden skies. A bluish hue tinged the city and people walked by, wrapped up to their ears and drawing lines of vapour with their breath in the cold air. Very few stopped to gaze at the shop window of Sempere & Sons; fewer still ventured inside to ask for that lost book that had been waiting for them all their lives and whose sale, poetic fancies aside, would have contributed to shoring up the bookshop’s ailing finances. Fermín had an idea yesterday,’ I offered. ‘He thinks it’s a brilliant plan that’ll save the bookshop from imminent bankruptcy.’

After finishing PoH, I have the urge to reread Shadow again to figure out how it all fits together. I can’t remember how Fermin and Daniel first cross paths. Knowing now that it couldn’t be by chance, I wonder if I’ll have a different reading experience.

I’m trying to gain a grip on the reason as to why everyone detests the book based on the sole fact that it’s not as good as Shadow of the Wind. For instance, if you compared Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel to one of his more mediocre pieces, certainly the mediocre piece would dull in comparison. But compare that same mediocre piece by Michelangelo to the average work of a common street artist and you may find that it is actually a beautiful piece. All three of the books so far are entire books in themselves, only bounded by this gothic universe that Zafon has created. The Shadow of the Wind is a masterpiece of intertwining relationships and of constant mistakes that made me terribly sad at some points. The Angel’s Game is a haunting and intimate tale that is doomed from the beginning, captured in a way that reflects the madness of the main character and written in an entirely different way than Shadow of the Wind. The Prisoner of Heaven is an almost re-awakening of Shadow of the Wind, yet doesn’t fall so dark into despair because Daniel isn’t the same character he was in Shadow of the Wind. He is wiser and more fulfilled, which doesn’t lead him into such dark circumstances that we see in Shadow of the Wind.

While the pastpresent threads still appear this time they are clearly divided rather than intertwined as before with Daniel and Fermin as the respective narrators in a presentpastpresent. Ultimately The Prisoner of Heaven reads like a filler novella. David Martín fled the country before the war I explained. For me, it was a fun surprise that Fermín and David knew each other. Well, fun may not be the best descriptor, given that they met in a corrupt and dangerous prison early in Franco’s dictatorship. But in any case, their connection helps the series to feel a lot more cohesive. The first two books felt largely separate from one another, but now that we’re nearing the end of the series, I’m starting to see how it all fits together. However, the Angel’s Game took me several months to finish, I kept giving up on it because I found it so slow and confusing. I feel that it could’ve been half as short and still contained all the important information.A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy. The translation by Lucia Graves is largely solid, I think, doing justice to Zafon’s witty and sometimes poetic narration. I think a few sentences or phrases get translated a little too literally at various points. For example, at one point the phrase “you do the sums” appears in a situation where it has the meaning of “you do the math”— things like that. But for most people, it’ll feel like a non-issue.

Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-03-28 23:54:29 Associated-names Graves, Lucia, translator Bookplateleaf 0010 Boxid IA40412702 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier No doubt I may feel different on re-reading the trilogy again, but on this third reading, it is this third book that is my fave, it has all the usually plus points - for genre writing with a post-modernist twist; being centred around books; stories within stories; believable but highly elaborate and colourful characterisations; an historical look at the Spanish Civil War through a Catalan lens;

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The Prisoner of Heaven is then, as a matter of fact, the third book in what is now, excuse my French, a freaking quartet! The prison that Fermín and David are in is representative of the turbulent and dismal times Spain was in at that time. After three years of the Spanish Civil War, this book takes places shortly after Francisco Franco won the war and became a fascist dictator. His dictatorial rule would last until 1975 – and indeed sets the tone most of this series – but it seemed to be most violent during those early years. In The Prisoner of Heaven Zafón starts to connect the pieces of what at first seemed like two entirely different books. Before the speaker ever makes her way to old age a hush of peace will descend over her. The visitor was limping away merging with the silhouettes that moved through the veil of blue mist sweeping up Calle Santa Ana.

Melodrama succeeds when there is no embarrassment in its execution, and Zafón is a splendidly solicitous craftsman, careful to give the reader at least as much pleasure as he is evidently having. Scene-setting is crisp, and minor characters expertly sketched: a priest with "the manners of a retired boxer", or a scrivener who guarantees the effects of his erotic love poetry. The evil prison governor, whose eyes are "blue, penetrating and sharp, alive with greed and suspicion", is a movie-villain cliché, but cliché is sometimes just what is needed to maintain the blissful narrative drive of a high-class mystery. Cómo no amar este libro cuando, en la primera página y a modo de nota de Julián Carax, el autor te advierte de todo lo que va a suceder? Pero, claro, todo lo entiendes una vez has leído la última palabra, cierras el libro y todo el peso de la historia cae sobre ti. ¿Cómo no amar este libro cuando en él se unen todas las líneas de historia de La Sombra del Viento y de El Prisionero del Cielo? ¿Cómo no amar este libro cuando su personaje principal es el más querido por nosotros los lectores: Fermín Romero de Torres? ¿Cómo no amar este libro si lo escribió Zafón y encima puedes leerlo con las canciones que él mismo compuso? Es imposible no adorar cada palabra de El Prisionero del Cielo. No doubt I may felt different on this what was my first reading, but on later readings, it is this third book that became my fave, it has all the usually plus points - for genre writing with a post-modernist twist; being centred around books; stories within stories; believable but highly elaborate and colourful characterisation; an historical look at the Spanish Civil War through a Catalan lens;

Cue to a few years later and we now have The Prisoner of Heaven. A small introduction tells us that this is part of a cycle of novels in the same literary universe and this labyrinth of stories “when woven together lead to the heart of the narrative”. I confess that I found myself at loose ends a fair bit. As this is a continuation of the previous stories, or at the very least, is linked to them, I found myself, ironically, constantly straining to remember who this or that was, and what happened to them, or what it was that they had done. And even though I had read both prior books and kept notes on them, one of a thousand hard drive crashes had annihilated much of the information, and also, my note-taking was not quite so OCD as it is these days, so even the retained notes were of less than outstanding value. Maybe the best approach to Ruiz Zafon is to make a pile of all the books in the series and read them in a row, the better to keep things straight.