Carlos Ruiz Zafon
“A legend is a lie that has been whipped up to explain a universal truth.” The Labyrinth of the Spirits is the fourth and last of Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s Cemetery of Forgotten Books series that began in 2001 with The Shadow of the Wind. The second book, The Angel’s Game, was a prequel and along with the third, The Prisoner of Heaven, filled in the characters met in the first and now they are brought to fruition in the fourth.
All the books center largely around Barcelona, the place of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. In case one needs a summary, in the last pages Zafon indulges in a cheeky metafictive publishers’ pitch that amounts to an apologia for the structure of the entire series, as his alter ego Julian Sempere, son of Daniel, the protagonist of the first book, explains exactly what has been happening all along.
Julian is charged with the task of writing the convoluted stories of the people caught up in the toils of Francoist oppression. But there is more to it than mere politics of the time: good and evil, fragility and resilience, innocence and pragmatism, are all here in continual clashing confrontation.