Book #66: The Angel's Game

Title: The Angel's Game
Author: Carlos Ruiz Zafon

I hate it when I break my own rules. One of my cardinal rules for reading books is that when I really fall in love with a book, I need to pace myself a little bit before reading another book by the same author, otherwise I always end up disappointed. It's like eating a second ice cream sundae in one sitting. The second one is never as good as the first, even when it would taste great a week later.

I think the rule especially applies for an author like Ruiz, whose style is so dark, so different from what I normally read that it's like entering a different world. But my reserve came through at the library after months of waiting, so I dove in.

The Angel's Game is the story of David Martin, a Barcelona orphan with a talent for writing, who starts out writing for a local newspaper, moves on to a long-term commitment churning out potboiler novels, and writes himself ragged in a creepy old mansion. It's also sort of a prequel to The Shadow of the Wind, with a 1920s Sempere and Sons bookshop as a setting for much of the action. When Martin's mentor runs off with his best girl, he takes on an ambitious writing challenge for a mysterious patron. The project turns out to be much more than he bargained for, and once again, the reader goes on nailbiting journeys through the macabre streets of Barcelona (is all of Barcelona macabre, or just in Ruiz's novels?), watching Martin making stupid mistakes and also gestures full of grace.

The Angel's Game is a good book. If I hadn't just read The Shadow of the Wind, I think I probably would have liked it a lot more. But the thing that frustrated me most about the novel was not that I found some of the characters frustrating or unbelievable (although I did). It's just that The Angel's Game seemed to change the whole premise of The Shadow of the Wind. It's almost Halloween, so I'll use this analogy. I love movies like Hitchcock's Rear Window, where strange, almost unbelievable things happen, but they can all eventually be explained by events in real life. I don't like movies like Carrie, where events take place that are outside the realm of reality. When I read The Shadow of the Wind, I thought Ruiz was writing Rear Window kinds of books, but The Angel's Game is a Carrie kind of book. I thought I was getting one thing, and I was really getting another. The two books are eventually supposed to be part of a series of five novels. Will I read the other three? Of course, but I also won't be surprised when supernatural things start happening for which there can be no rational explanation.