BARCELONA, Spain -- Carlos Ruiz Zafon strides through the labyrinth of Barcelona's Gothic quarter, making his way with ease through this neighborhood of narrow streets, stone walls, low light and mystery.
"We're nearly there," he says, turning down an alley as skinny street cats dart out of his way. Two more rights and a left, and Ruiz Zafon emerges from the dim passageway into a small, open plaza. "The tourists haven't found this spot yet," he says, pleased.
The Plaza de San Felipe Neri looks exactly the way Ruiz Zafon describes it in his best-selling novel, "The Shadow of the Wind," which is set in 1940s Barcelona. As he writes in the book, the plaza "is like a small air shaft in the maze of streets that crisscross the Gothic quarter, hidden behind old roman walls. The holes left by machine gun fire during the war pockmark the church walls."
And so it is today, a surprisingly peaceful spot that still bears the cruel scars of Spain's Civil War, a war that happened long before Ruiz Zafon was born but one that has infused his work and colored his view of the city.
"For me, Barcelona is a haunted city," Ruiz Zafon says in perfect English as he chats in the plaza, his back to the scarred walls and to the children happily playing in front of them. "It has this element of mystery and intrigue, this melancholy that I wanted to use somehow in my stories. It may seem like a big playground that's always in the middle of a fiesta, but I think there's another side."
Ruiz Zafon has turned serious, his face unsmiling as he talks about the ghosts that drift through this Mediterranean city.
A former screenwriter, he has lived and worked in Los Angeles for the past 10 years. His goatee and preference of wearing all black speak more of New York than California but nevertheless reveal the years he spent working in Hollywood. His soul, though, is still in his native Barcelona.
"I love Barcelona, but it's not a coincidence that I had to move halfway around the world to be able to write about it. Sometimes, distance makes you see things in a different way," he says, fiddling with the thin-rimmed glasses that give him an intellectual air.
The melancholic Barcelona to which Ruiz Zafon refers is barely visible today, hidden beneath the trendy shops, tank-topped travelers and tour groups that now fill the streets. But it is captured beautifully in his novel, where the city's damp alleys and quiet plazas play an important role in setting the book's mysterious tone.
"Barcelona's presence is so strong that she becomes almost like another character," he says.
"The Shadow of the Wind" is set in central Barcelona during the harsh postwar years when dictator Francisco Franco ran the country in a ruthless way. The story peers past the backdrop of a suffering city and often cruel government to focus on the life, love and adventures of a boy named Daniel, a poor bookseller's son who lives in the heart of Barcelona's Gothic quarter.
When he is 10, Daniel is taken to the mysterious Cemetery of Forgotten Books and is told to choose a book, for which he must care. He chooses "La Sombra del Viento" ("The Shadow of the Wind"), an adventure story that fascinates Daniel, especially when he learns that all other copies of the book and the rest of the those written by its author, Julian Carax, have been burned.
The boy sets out on a long and often dangerous quest to discover the truth about Carax and his burned books. As the story unspools, Daniel's life becomes intricately linked with Carax's, often paralleling it in mysterious and unsettling ways. It ultimately becomes clear that in trying to save Carax's work, Daniel is saving himself.
Though gothic Barcelona is a strong presence in the novel, "The Shadow of the Wind" is not about the city. In large part, it's about the power of books and their ability to influence our lives. Ruiz Zafon describes it as "a love letter to reading."
This is the author's fifth book but first work of mainstream fiction. It has been a big seller in Spain since it was published in 2001. Released in the United States only this April, it has also proved to be a hit in English, reaching No. 22 on The New York Times list of best sellers.
The novel, published in the United States by The Penguin Press, has been sold in 20 countries, becoming the number one best seller in several countries, including Germany.
"I dare say that worldwide it's one of the most popular non-English novels of the past year," says Scott Moyers, the American editor of "The Shadow of the Wind."
"Its focus is universally appealing: a motherless child on a quest for wholeness."
The book's big-hearted, ambitious breadth is another reason for its success, Moyers says. "This book is gothic in the best sense of the word. It's got murder, madness, dark family secrets, haunted houses, someone whose life is in jeopardy, someone who's on a quest. It has that certain darkly alluring quality."
Stephen King praised it, too, writing in Entertainment Weekly, "If you thought the true gothic novel died with the 19th century, this will change your mind. 'Shadow' is the real deal."
The talk doesn't end there: There is much buzz about making a movie version.
"It will absolutely be turned into a film - it's just a matter of time," Jon Furay of Other Productions said. "'Shadow' is appealing for film because it's an intensely personal story, and one where we see it through a young boy's eyes. The coming of age story is shrouded in a literary mystery."
The author, however, isn't necessarily committing to a screen idea.
"Sometimes it's OK that a book is just a book," he says, unwilling to make a firm stance about turning "Shadow of the Wind" into a movie.
Yet Ruiz Zafon isn't shy about acknowledging that the book is good enough to earn such attention.
"I used every technique at my disposal to make the book as engaging as possible, and I didn't stop writing until I felt it was as good as I could make it," he says matter-of-factly. "But I'm just the author, I can't tell you why people actually liked the book so much.
"The readers' reactions to this book is what has made it special. It's about literature, the love of books, the experience of reading. That's universal - you don't need a passport to understand it."
Emili Rosales of Editorial Planeta, the Spanish editor of "The Shadow of the Wind," says this universal appeal is responsible for the book's success at home and abroad.
"Although Barcelona and postwar Spain is the frame for the story, its power comes from the fact that it brings together the great themes of literature: a first love, fear, deception, death."
Ruiz Zafon lives in California, has been a screenwriter and early in his career was considered one of Spain's most successful advertising writers. But he is old-fashioned when it comes to books and storytelling, an attitude shown clearly in his complex, almost Dickensonian 486-page novel.
"My references are the 19th-century novelists, the giants of storytelling," he says. "What I want to do is take all these 19th-century sagas and rebuild them, using all the techniques from the 20th century, the techniques we've learned from film and pop culture.
"What if we try to get the grand scale of Dickens and Tolstoy novels using all these new devices to enhance the reading experience?" he asks excitedly.
"It may sound pretentious, but that's what I was trying to do with 'The Shadow of the Wind.' It's a cathedral of stories with many subplots and elements, and everything converges."
Ruiz Zafon seems to have a penchant for epic works. His first novel was a 600-page science fiction "monster" that he wrote at age 13 but never published. His later books - four works of juvenile mystery that have not yet been translated into English - were a bit more tame but similarly complex.
His 1993 novel, "The Prince of Shadow," is about a diabolic prince who grants wishes at very high personal prices. "The Lights of September," which came out in 1995, focuses on a toy maker who lives in a haunted mansion alongside mechanical creatures and ghosts from the past.
But it wasn't until "The Shadow of the Wind" that he found the book he's always wanted to write. The power of books and storytelling is an important theme running throughout "The Shadow of the Wind," so it should be no surprise that its author believes strongly in books in real life as well.
"The novel is the most complex, most complete way to tell stories," he says. "If storytelling were left up to TV and movies, there would be a risk of real books becoming just a novelty.
"It's important that reading doesn't become a snobby thing, or something only for intellectuals. Think about the Penguin Classics. Those books were never obscure, they were written for the people. They were real, and so they lasted."
His views on the trite stories often told on television are slyly conveyed in his comic character, Fermin Romero de Torres, who quips: "Television, my dear Daniel, is the Antichrist. ... Our world will not die as a result of the bomb, as the papers say, it will die of laughter, of banality, of making a joke of everything and a lousy joke at that."
The power of books, on the other hand, is praised repeatedly. Ruiz Zafon slips another personal opinion into his character's mouths when Julian Carax says poetically, "A book is a mirror."
"I tried to create a book that helps you to see things in yourself," the author says.
Though Ruiz Zafon is now busy promoting his book throughout Europe and the United States, he has already started work on a second book in the same vein.
"I see this as the first of four novels that use Gothic Barcelona as a base. All four will share the same universe, but you can read just one, or read them in any order. They're independent stories."
As he walks slowly out of the Gothic quarter, headed back to the modern apartment he still owns in the city, Ruiz Zafon walks along the Portal de l'Angel, darting a few street artists and pausing to glance at the news kiosk set up in the street. In "The Shadow of the Wind" this avenue is the mysterious place where the incarnation of the devil (Lain Coubert) first appears to Daniel. Yet here in real, modern Barcelona it's a wide pedestrian avenue packed with shoe shops, chain stores and street artists who sing for tourists.
To Ruiz Zafon, the boulevard's hustle and bustle is just a "plastic, Disney-fied" version of the city. The real soul of Barcelona is found in its hidden plazas, its dark corners, and in unsearchable places like the author's memory, a place he's opened to readers in the pages of "The Shadow of the Wind."
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