Carlos Ruiz Zafón is a Barcelona native who lives and writes in Los Angeles. Originally a young adult fiction author, he switched to “adult” fiction in 2001 with the bestseller The Shadow of the Wind (or La sombra del viento), to which his latest novel, The Angel’s Game (or El juego del ángel) functions as a prequel. The novel emphasizes the power of the written word and has been compared to Edgar Allan Poe’s work, with its themes of love and obsession and its penchant for the supernatural. In an interview with Three Monkeys Online, Zafón discusses the global nature of books, his works, and his literary philosophy.***
TMO: You often mention British, French or Russian writers among your influences. Which Catalan or Spanish language writers have inspired you most?
Zafón: Yes, it is true that most of my literary influences tend to come from other traditions. I really cannot explain why that is. I am not really aware of specific influences coming from either Catalan or Spanish authors, although I admire and enjoy reading many of them, from Perez-Galdos to Merce Rodoreda and many others. There are many Latin-American authors as well whose use of prose and narrative devices has been very interesting for the last few decades and has generated a school of its own. I guess in a way when a writer reads she/he tends to internalize and analyze things and therefore everything has an influence, an impact and a consequence. In my case, for some reason, since I was a child I’ve always felt more attuned and interested in authors that came from other traditions. In fact I don’t think of literature, or music, or any art form as having a nationality. Where you’re born is simply an accident of fate. I don’t see why I shouldn’t be more interested in say, Dickens, than in an author from Barcelona simply because I wasn’t born in the U.K. I do not have an ethnocentric view of things, much less of literature. Books hold no passports. There’s only one true literary tradition: the human.
TMO: The ambience in some of your work, with fog, snow, and so on, is very northern. I’d guess Stevenson and Conan Doyle are among your favorite English language writers? Who else do you admire in terms of scene-setting and description?
Zafón: Too many to mention, I guess. I tend to like some of the great 19th century writers, especially Charles Dickens. That said, a great deal of my influences come from the cinema rather than from literature. Visual storytelling is very much part of my wiring.
TMO: The Shadow of the Wind is set in the early Franco era. The logical next step might have been to pick up where you left off chronologically. Instead, in your latest novel, The Angel’s Game, you’ve written a prequel going back another generation or so. Why?
Zafón: I never meant to write a sequential saga, or a series of sequels of sorts. The idea is to write stories around this literary universe centered around the cemetery of forgotten books, exploring this gothic, mysterious universe through different characters and storyl ines. As you say, perhaps it would have been more commercially advisable to do that, to write a straight sequel and pick up the story where we left it, but it was never my idea to do so and I think it is more interesting to play around with the narrative spaces and lines to pull the reader into a fictional universe that plays by its own rules.
TMO: The history of Catalonia/Spain is well documented from the Civil War period onwards ,but outside of the country itself, there is little focus on the earlier part of the 20th century. Was that in your thoughts at all? Has the Franco era has been done to death in terms of both history and literature?
Zafón: It would be hard to overstate the impact and significance of the Franco era (40 years) after the war. The Spanish Civil War is the most significant event in modern Spanish history, and it would be naïve to think it is been already covered, although probably it generated almost as much bibliography as World War Two, to which in many ways it’s a prelude. You’re right that outside of Spain there isn’t much focus on earlier Spanish history, but then again we could say that of almost any nation. We seem to live in a world where forgetting and oblivion are an industry in themselves and very, very few people are remotely interested or aware of their own recent history, much less their neighbors’. I tend to think we are what we remember, what we know. The less we remember, the less we know about ourselves, the less we are.
TMO: Does fiction have to be historically accurate?
Zafón: No. Fiction has to be effective, moving, stimulating, seductive. Fiction has to tell a good story in the best possible way. Then it can choose to be emotionally honest and accurate or not. History writing should be accurate, on the other hand, but that’s another long debate I guess.
***
You can check out the full interview here, and if you’re in any of the following areas this week, you can catch Zafón himself:
Monday, June 22 at 7:00 p.m.
Harvard Bookstore
1256 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, Mass. 02138
617.661.1515
Tuesday, June 23 at 7:00 p.m.
Nicola’s Books
2513 Jackson Ave.
Ann Arbor, Mich. 48103
734.662.0600
Wednesday, June 24 at 7:00 p.m.
Bagdad Theater & Pub
3702 SE Hawthorne Blvd.
Portland, Ore. 97214
503.236.9234
--Emmaline Silverman
Photo: The Age
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