I’ve already walked all the way back
My heart is so shattered; you wont believe it
I asked you what are the remains of our relationship
But you refused to reply
The only thing I could do was to guess
And all my guesses turned out to be wrong
My tears are drowning out my sorrow
Your only consolation to me was the lost of hope
Why am I the one getting punished
When you are the one who’s lying
Why don’t you just take a knife and stab me at my heart
I can take the pain over and over again
You can do the wrong things over and over again
I wont run away from the promise that you broke
I turn around to let you cling on to me
But you made use of my generosity
I listened to this song again today, and I realised that it no longer reminds me as strongly of you as it did before. I realised that some parts of my memories are fading away already.
*
As it unfolded, the structure of the story began to remind me of one of those Russian dolls that contain innumerable ever-smaller dolls within. Step by step the narrative split into a thousand stories, as if it had entered a gallery of mirrors, it’s identity fragmented into endless reflections. …I was plunged into a new world of images and sensations, peopled by characters who seemed as real to me as my room. Page after page I let the spell of the story and its world take me over…”
There, Carlos Ruiz Zofon, Spanish writer who lives in Barcelona, had already reviewed his own masterpiece, the Shadow of the Wind, within the book itself. For once, after reading an epic type of a good book, I’m speechless. I don’t really know what to say. The Shadow of the Wind is a mystery, but within it there are hundreds of mirrors for us to look into. Stories within stories to unfold. It is more than a mystery.
It was Barcelona in 1940s. This is the first Spanish book I’d read (it’s english translation, of course), the first time I come across strange spanish words, Spain’s culture, fragments of their history and wartime memories. The Shadow of the Wind is about a bunch of people bound together by a destiny they cannot escape… and it’s painful to read about them. Except that Zafon gives us a chance at redemption, in a way, through Daniel, protagonist of the book. Daniel found a book written by a mysterious author, and proceeded to look for other books written by this author, only to find out that someone had been mysteriously buying all of these books and burning them to ashes. As the story of this mystery unfolded, Daniel realised that his life was starting to screw up as well, and it is getting a tad too similar to that of the mysterious author.
*
Some nice passages from the book:
The two friends looked at each other in the sticky light of the cafe, spellbound. The last time they had seen each other face-to-face, they were half the age they were now. They had parted as boys, and now life presented one of them with a fugitive and the other with a dying man. Both wondered whether this was due to the cards they’d been dealt or to the way they had played them.
Later, once night had fallen, our lips met, and in the shelter of that pressing darkness, we removed our clothes, which smelt of fear and of death. I wanted to remember Miquel, but the fire of those hands on my stomach stole all my shame and my grief. I wanted to lose myself in them, even though i knew that at dawn, exhausted and perhaps overcome by contempt for ourselves, we would be unable to look each other in the eye without wondering what sort of people we had become.
I was afraid of listening to Julian and starting to believe, as he did, that we are all bound together in a strange chain of destiny…
*
I realised that I always like to read about what time do to us physically and to our hearts and souls. It just makes me really sad and makes me want to treasure what I have now. But as usual, time slips by so quickly without you knowing… it just leaves you with a bundle of regrets and remorse at the end of it all.
I realised after reading that Murakami is a little like a mystery kind of writer as well. Ishiguro too. Maybe I’m the mystery-reading type of girl. Haha! Next I’m gonna read The World According to Garp by one of Murakami’s fave authors, John Irving. I MUST finish it!
I hope the rest of my holidays will go as I wish.
