With book four, I was given the choice between:

‘The Song of Achilles’ by Madeline Miller

 ‘My Brilliant Friend’ by Elena Ferrante

‘Shadow of the Wind’ by Carlos Ruis Zafon

These were all books I (naturally) had strongly desired to read between my interests in Greek mythology, my awareness of Elena Ferrante as a renowned author, and a genuine enjoyment for works of metafiction. It was the latter that won out in the end. Little did I know that it was a choice that led to me reading the best book of my Scaling the TBR Pile experience thus far.

Goodreads summary: The international literary sensation, about a boy’s quest through the secrets and shadows of postwar Barcelona for a mysterious author whose book has proved as dangerous to own as it is impossible to forget.

Barcelona, 1945 – just after the war, a great world city lies in shadow, nursing its wounds, and a boy named Daniel awakes on his eleventh birthday to find that he can no longer remember his mother’s face. To console his only child, Daniel’s widowed father, an antiquarian book dealer, initiates him into the secret of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a library tended by Barcelona’s guild of rare-book dealers as a repository for books forgotten by the world, waiting for someone who will care about them again. Daniel’s father coaxes him to choose a volume from the spiraling labyrinth of shelves, one that, it is said, will have a special meaning for him. And Daniel so loves the novel he selects, The Shadow of the Wind by one Julian Carax, that he sets out to find the rest of Carax’s work. To his shock, he discovers that someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book this author has written. In fact, he may have the last one in existence. Before Daniel knows it his seemingly innocent quest has opened a door into one of Barcelona’s darkest secrets, an epic story of murder, magic, madness and doomed love. And before long he realizes that if he doesn’t find out the truth about Julian Carax, he and those closest to him will suffer horribly.

As with all astounding novels, The Shadow of the Wind sends the mind groping for comparisons—The Crimson Petal and the White? The novels of Arturo Pérez-Reverte? Of Victor Hugo? Love in the Time of Cholera?—but in the end, as with all astounding novels, no comparison can suffice. As one leading Spanish reviewer wrote, “The originality of Ruiz Zafón’s voice is bombproof and displays a diabolical talent. The Shadow of the Wind announces a phenomenon in Spanish literature.” An uncannily absorbing historical mystery, a heart-piercing romance, and a moving homage to the mystical power of books, The Shadow of the Wind is a triumph of the storyteller’s art.

As a reader, I love to read books about books. Books that mess around with the very boundaries of their being get me excited in a way that few genres really do. A novel called ‘The Shadow of the Wind’ about (primarily) a novel called ‘The Shadow of the Wind’ is a simple enough conceit, but just adds an extra layer on top of what turned out to be a dramatic, heart wrenching and warmly humorous narrative that had me rushing to the end to find out what happened to Daniel Sempere and the mysterious author, Julián Carax, who wrote ‘The Shadow of the Wind’.

Starting a story with a father taking his boy on a trip to ‘The Cemetery of Forgotten Books’ was always going to evoke an element of the fantastical, and this feeling pervades throughout the plot. Though grounded firmly in 1945 Barcelona, one that is brought to life by Zafon’s deft description, there is always a sense that something extraordinary is occurring in the life of Sempere, the protagonist and narrator for most of the novel. Being little more than a teenage by the end of the narrative, many of these descriptions serve to convey Sempere’s fluctuating and deep-seated emotions as he often naively stumbles through a world of events that seem beyond his control. As he moves closer to solving the mystery of Carax and new, scary people rear their heads and come out of the shadows, Sempere never quite gets a chance to take stock of the perils that lay ahead and we are thrust ahead alongside him to the finale.

It is the mystery element of ‘The Shadow of the Wind’ that helps to drive things forward as it plays out as addictively engaging as the latest crime thriller. Each chapter provided something new: a glimpse of Carax’s past; a tense encounter with a shadowy man hell-bent on recovering the book; a run-in with Inspector Fumero, the police detective taking advantage of a post-civil war Spain to make up his own rules. In particular, every new character that is introduced feels fully realised and part of a wider world that is forever working even when you aren’t reading specifically about it. A personal favourite was Fermin Romero de Torres, one time tramp turned friend to Sempere. The warm humour that was mentioned was primarily from the mouth of Fermin as he was given a chance to turn his life around again by the Sempere family, often in rather touching and occasionally dubious guidance to Daniel about affairs of the heart.

A novel if often furthered with a genuinely sympathetic protagonist and an antagonist that is easy to despise. In Sempere and Fumero, that is exactly what Zafon provides. Fumero in particular is a product of a world turned upside down and struggling to work outs its position in a post-war Europe, though rather than the feelings of isolation and sadness that permeates many of the other characters, Fumero uses this atmosphere to control and destroy those who stand against him. With no redeeming features, Fumero acts as a perfect counterpoint to Sempere’s naïve youth.

At its heart though, the book is about love. From his love of ‘The Shadow of the Wind’ to the first heartbreak in the house of Clara Barceló and his subsequent attempts to woo Beatriz Aguilar, Sempere has the life or death emotional spectrum that can only exist in the world of a teen. This duality of love, as something that can both nourish and harm, is explored in the lives of other characters as well, though often it leads to decisions that can only really be considered negative or restrictive in nature. Over the years that the narrative covers love is often chosen as a way to feel less alone as the world around people turns darker and more foreboding.

A wonderfully plotted and beautifully evocative novel, ‘The Shadow of the Wind’ was a great read that moved me as the twists and turns of the narrative revealed the tragic realities of events long ago. Heartily recommended.

The choices for the third book in my attempt at Scaling the TBR Pile were:

‘Wizard of the Crow’ by Ngugi wa Thiong’o

‘The Secret History’ by Donna Tartt

‘Fates and Furies’ by Lauren Goff

Whilst fate seems to want me to read ‘Wizard of the Crow’, I fancied something a little quicker after the occasional slog that was ‘Snow Crash’. Having had ‘Fates and Furies’ discussed in the same breath as books like ‘One Day’, I felt it would be a nice change of pace from Stephenson’s sci-fi machinations.

Goodreads summary: Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes, it turns out, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets. At the core of this rich, expansive, layered novel, Lauren Groff presents the story of one such marriage over the course of twenty-four years.

At age twenty-two, Lotto and Mathilde are tall, glamorous, madly in love, and destined for greatness. A decade later, their marriage is still the envy of their friends, but with an electric thrill we understand that things are even more complicated and remarkable than they have seemed.

The first thing that hits you upon reading ‘Fates and Furies’ by Lauren Groff is the darkness that pervades throughout the narrative even as early as the second chapter as the focus splits in two. The narrative voice that occasionally adds a greater understanding to an exchange or a thought positions us to follow Lotto’s life story, one that we are thrust into at the point of birth and not enough years away from his father’s passing. He is ‘the shining one’ and it is his story that is representative of the ‘Fates’ that are mentioned in the title of the novel.

The speed at which Groff takes us through Lotto’s life, his eventual marriage to Mathilde and his career as a failed actor and eventually successful writer is indicative of a feeling of time slipping away for most of the characters in the story. Once bright young things, the passing of the months and the years – sometimes in a matter of sentences – presents a world that begins to dull around the edges; the march towards the mundane, punctuated with stories of death, divorce and childlessness. The parties that went on into the small hours gave way to depression and self-doubt as the reality of an unfulfilled life takes over.

Throughout, it is the relationship between Lotto and Mathilde that carries him through. In the first half of the book, she appears rather than acts more often than not, a mirror through which we see Lotto’s thoughts and frustrations. It isn’t until ‘Furies’, the second half of the novel, where Mathilde really gets to shine as we see things through her eyes. Behind every good man is an even greater woman, and Mathilde definitely tries to be that for Lotto, though sometimes in a fashion that felt as if it lacked believability.

Indeed, whilst Groff’s book is eminently readable and the prose does a wonderful job of selling the reader the passionate love that Lotto and Mathilde hold onto as best they can, there are moments towards the end of the novel where things do spiral out of control. Mathilde’s early years, in particular, do stretch the boundaries of plausibility, and whilst this view of the story through her eyes adds pleasing layers to the narrative, it did feel a little too coincidental at times the manner at which elements of plot managed to link up further down the line.

The toll that living takes upon several of the characters only helps to add to the foreboding tone that is often just below the surface. The body count is surprisingly high for a book that focuses on a romance between two people as family members die, acquaintances and lovers commit suicide, and we even get some sexual assault thrown in during a time when Lotto was struggling to fill the void left by his father. The only thing that competes with death and love is sex, though it is both lauded and derided in equal measure as the raunchy days of youth turn into the tired attempts of age.

What Groff manages to do in ‘Fates and Furies’ is present a love story about a twenty-four year marriage that ends up feeling less than romantic when viewed across the whole. Even though their love is presented with effective description, the emotion is often fuelled by success or maintained through lies and secrecy. By splitting the two narratives so effectively, Groff manages to present the darker underbelly of what we have witnessed after firmly establishing the relationship of Lotto and Mathilde in all its seeming honesty.

A worthwhile read – I gave it 4/5 at Goodreads. Follow my account at https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/2005594.Liam_Byrne

For book two, my three options were:

‘Red Mars’ by Kim Stanley Robinson

‘Look Who’s Back’ by Timur Vernes

‘Snow Crash’ by Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson is an author who I own two books by (the aforementioned ‘Snow Crash’ and ‘Cryptonomicon’), but I’d never really even opened the first page let alone cracked the spine of either. I saw this as an opportunity to gain some momentum as well due to ‘Snow Crash’ being the biggest book of the trio.

Goodreads synopsis: In reality, Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for Uncle Enzo’s CosoNostra Pizza Inc., but in the Metaverse he’s a warrior prince. Plunging headlong into the enigma of a new computer virus that’s striking down hackers everywhere, he races along the neon-lit streets on a search-and-destroy mission for the shadowy virtual villain threatening to bring about infocalypse. Snow Crash is a mind-altering romp through a future America so bizarre, so outrageous… you’ll recognize it immediately.

When it comes to a) science fiction narratives and b) length books, I occasionally feel that the pure workload that is required deserves merit, whether I particularly end up enjoying reading or not. A few years back, when I read ‘War and Peace’, I couldn’t honestly say I enjoyed every moment, but a book with that much content and complete focus on presenting the story the author wanted, length be damned, meant I came out of it feeling my time had been well spent, even if some evenings spent with the book were not particularly enjoyable.

‘Snow Crash’ isn’t anywhere near the length of ‘War and Peace’, but Neal Stephenson clearly had the story he wanted to tell and he was going to tell it without any desire to hold his reader’s hands or dumb things down for those who were unwilling to work for it. Unfortunately, this kills the pace of the book at times as crypto-religious exposition takes up page after page whilst I was left waiting for the action. If you bought into what Stephenson was selling you, this would have all been worthwhile. For me, it just felt like a lot of sizzle with no steak.

What Stephenson does do well is world building and action sequences. You get a keen sense of the world that Hiro Protagonist and Y.T. as one that sits just close enough to what exists now for it to be eerily feasible, yet also allowing some wilder flights of fancy across the narrative. Calling one of your main characters Hiro Protagonist is a little bit too cute for my liking, something which Stephenson is want to do at times. However, little touches like the rule book for using toilet paper at the Fed are legitimately funny and show Stephenson at his best.

The use of two main protagonists allows Stephenson to send them both off in different directions. This comes in handy when Hiro’s ‘part’ of the story slows down as he engages in crypto-religious discussion with The Librarian as at least Y.T. is engaged in action and adventure. Though Hiro’s discoveries are key to the overarching narrative, as well as showcasing some deep knowledge by Stephenson himself, it slows things down in a way that feels unnecessary to me. To others, I’m sure they’d love the slow unveiling of all this mystical and historical information. Even though it was central to the plot in many ways, the delivery of this never quite sat right with me.

Though at times this may sound like I didn’t enjoy the book, it still all worked together to make the last hundred pages or so a genuinely riveting read. I cared enough about the outcomes for Hiro and Y.T., alongside an interest in other characters who had been introduced by this point, most specifically Raven, a guy who is incredibly dangerous and not so good at keeping his temper. This race to the end was where the book did pick up pace, helped by the narrative/world building Stephenson had done up until that point and an increased focus on the action as the end game became more apparent.

It leaves me in an odd position. I celebrate the intelligence of Stephenson’s writing, as well as his unflinching approach to long form storytelling, whilst not necessarily being desirous of reading anything else he has put out there as I’d expect more of the same. It isn’t hard to see why Stephenson has built up a decent, if niche, following and reading ‘Snow Crash’ was definitely worthwhile, just not the eye opening experience I had perhaps expected.