A child cries because he does not remember his dead mother’s face. Your priest, the librero, suggests something, entry into the endless labyrinthine place that is Consuelo and a secret: a library that keeps within it all knowledge, all the sensitivity of the world. The Cemetery of Forgotten Books was created by Carlos Ruiz Razon, but the refuge of those books exists, whether for that child who read them in a mid-twentieth-century TV series in Barcelona, or for those who these days visit the International Book Fair in Guadalajara, Mexico. Ruiz Zafón, who five years ago lived in Los Angeles, came here for the last time in 2016, and this month, but after a decade, he is returning thanks to the votes of his friends.
Ruiz Zafón is the most widely read Spanish writer since Cervantes. It has sold more than 50 million copies, and has been translated into 52 languages, and its books have recently reached places such as Mongolia, Kurdistan, or Ethiopia, led by its publisher, Hilda Gersen, who has followed its path from the beginning. She, along with editor Emily Rosales and journalist Sergio Villa-San Juan, at La Vanguardia, are briefed by a group of people who know the author well. Ruiz Zafón, an hermit and hermit, spent his final years in a mansion in Los Angeles with his wife, Marie Carmen Belver, who was also in the audience this month. He communicated with his friend Eduardo Mendoza, who shared his passion for Dragons and Barcelona via… mail till the end. In June 2020, at the age of 55 and after two years of cancer, Ruiz Zafón died on the California coast, where he had decided to move in 1994 so that he could never go again.
“He goes to the United States because he is fascinated by the world of cinema. Being there allows him to meet Hollywood screenwriters and get away from the material that he brought home from Barcelona, which he knew was foreign to him, but which he sees in another way, he sees it with the eyes of the American cultural world. By entering the world of screenwriters, he also learns a series of techniques that an ordinary literary writer does not know,” describes journalist Sergio Villa Sanjuan about this asset. Ruiz Zafón had written a novel for young people (Prince de la Niebla, September lights the Marina) before moving on to the distinguished writer who will compare him to JK Rowling, Stieg Larsson or Stephen King.
Villa Sanjuan remembers the afternoon in the spring of 2001 when he opened the thousandth package of books that received La Vanguardia’s cultural supplement. Many Ojeó were poured through the lid by one of the Planeta. “So I devoted the entire weekend to reading enthusiastically The shadow of the wind“I was really amazed,” he says. Then I spent 20 years turning out supplements, and I read and thought: “There’s something that needs to be done.” I wrote a review – “the first valuable text” on the work of Carlos Ruiz Zafón – Alarm; the address: “The shadow of the wind He announces the phenomenon of popular Spanish literature. “At times in my life I have clearly seen that a book changes things,” he says now.
However, we had already spent the Sant Jordi Festival, the book festival in Catalonia, and the book initially progressed “shyly” in sales. Villa Sanjuan remembers Ruiz Zafón’s first appearance in Barcelona, in July 2002, at the Pipa Club, a place near the sea, where he “expelled the kites” from the city. There was intense heat and there was color transfer. After the show, the announcer and attendee took a tour of the Plaza del Real. “His father’s insurance company is right next to my house numbers – Calle Palmes is up the street – and Carlos slept there in the insurance office. That’s where we have our friends,” says the journalist.
That was until 2003 at the Frankfurt Fair, the most important in the world and the main meeting for the sale of rights, when The shadow of the wind exploited. “The German foreign minister, Ursula Fischer, recommended it for a literary program and said something like, ‘I had to rule the country for a day and a half because I couldn’t stop reading this novel,'” says Heidel-Gersen.
Then the polls took place. “The book is a tribute to reading, an art that seems to be slowly dying out,” said the French jury that awarded the prize for best foreign series in 2004. There was a reason why Ruiz Zafón from the beginning refused to turn it into a film. I explained it here, in Guadalajara, at FIL 21 years ago: “I suggest it on many occasions, almost every week, but for once, it’s okay for the book to remain as it is.”
“What warm receptions there were in rooms like this in Guadalajara and throughout Mexico when Carlos came to present his books,” said his editor, Emily Rosales, of Planeta. “He was practically supposed to have public order problems because he was received like a pop star.” Endless travels pushed Ruiz Zafón to give up writing, as he explained to this periodical in 2004: “I spend a year and a half traveling with the book and I can’t write it when I’m travelling. In my head I have another volume related to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, but at the moment I have nothing, and no time to write.”
Ruiz Zafón was always writing. For 14 years he wrote 600 pages of the fantasy novel, then his favorite. It took two of the three editors to come to editor Francisco Burroa’s workshop in Barcelona. Poroa, who took out the Minotauro seal, greeted him kindly and said: “Hey, there is wood here, but I don’t have much time. Come home and see you in 10 years.” It took a little longer, because Ruiz Zafón was 37 years old when he published The shadow of the wind y I knew then that it was a quad.
“What Carlos dreamed of in his novels has actually happened: giving life to a quartet of more than 2,000 pages of people whom we have circulated around the world of books: writers, editors, librarians, journalists, illustrators, translators, librarians or just sites of adventure. And sites of printed letters,” claims Emily Rosales, who refers to the “privilege” of seeing the emergence of “authentic, unique, personal and unrepeatable literature of our time, an authentic classic of the 21st century.”
Over short distances, his wonderful humor, kindness, culture, wisdom and great conversations are remembered by all his friends. “Imbizaba with stories that were just invented while crossing the brain, with its ability to dream, with its music – the piano – and its complexity and its faith in books,” points out Rosales, who concludes: “How can we measure the gratitude we owe to the writer, who has achieved that when millions of readers around the world think of him? Pervivencia de los libros, pensen en una ciudad: Barcelona.”