The Prisoner of Heaven by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

I don't have a lot of time for reading this time of year since I'm overwhelmed with Festival-planning and several other projects next year but I have managed to read Carlos Ruiz Zafon's novel, The Prisoner of Heaven. Because I was in Barcelona last week for a work project, I started the novel the week before I left but have still only managed to get about halfway through it.

It's interesting. Set in the 1950s in Barcelona, the novel tells the story of a young man on the cusp of his adult life, newly married with a young child and working in his father's bookshop in the city. Due to a mysterious stranger he learns about the sacrifices made by a close family friend during WWII and the Spanish Civil War. The novel skips around in time which is an interesting aspect to the way the story is presented and the dry pages of history really come alive here.

Zafon's novels that I've read are engaging and very readable (translated from Spanish) but I also struggle with their lack of depth. Sure, there are historical secrets revealed and I love the setting which he so richly captures. But I don't really find the characters that alive or that realistic. They are too extreme: either all good and saintly or pure evil. As most of us know, that's just not how people are. I prefer characters that are more complex; I prefer more ambiguous, complex questions about morality and history.

Perhaps I'm being unfair since I've only read half the novel - and perhaps I will change my mind later - but this is what strikes me so far. I'm still enjoying it but I find these kinds of novels don't stay with me. In a few years, I'll be able to read it again and will remember very little about it. I contrast this, for example, with Elena Ferrante's main characters in her Neapolitan novels who are devilishly complex: sometimes you adore them; other times you detest them. They are not easy people to understand, their motivations are complicated and deep, like most humans are.

Still, it's a book worth reading and I can see why Zafon is such a broadly appealing writer.

Javier Marías: The Infatuations

Spanish writer Javier Marías: is one of those writers whose name I've known for years but I've never had the occasion to read his work until last week when I read The Infatuations. Wow, I was really blown away.

The novel has a fairly simple premise: a woman sees a couple at a cafe regularly, imagining their lives, noticing them, considering them a dream couple. But when the man is murdered under bizarre circumstances, she befriends the wife and a kind of intellectual murder mystery commences.

It's not your typical kind of murder mystery but it's very entertaining, cerebral, and with long flowing sentences that you have to read and re-read since they are so densely packed.

Along the way, I was at times reminded of Joan Didion's treatise on grief, The Year of Magical Thinking. Yes, they are very different works (Didion's is not fictional) but they both look at grief from a stripped down point of view, not glamourized or romanticized. But Marías' work delves into the process as an outsider on the perimeters of grief of pain.

I read this over a few nights on the sofa as Christmas music played in the background and rain poured down outside, melting all the early snow we've had this year.

It makes me very interested in getting my hands on some of his other works.

Lorca in New York

I discovered this amazing website where one can read all about Frederico Garcia Lorca's brief life in New York City in 1929 and 1930 (as a student at Columbia).

Yay! New York City!!

It's very interactive so you can click on a particular location of the city and find out about a party he attended or a poem he wrote based on that location or someone influential that he met. All of these experiences led Lorca to write Poet in New York which contains some of his best-known works and allows him to present some of this consistent themes in a new light: the oppression of the poor, exploitation, violence, etc.

For any afficionados of Lorca's work or life, the website and map are a gold mine of fascinating anecdotes and direct influences on his poems. For newcomers to Lorca, it's a great introduction to his most accessible series of poems (though one would hardly say that Lorca's work in general is inaccessible).

The map is part of a series of events throughout New York City this spring and summer commemorating the work of Lorca. More information on that here. These events include an exhibition at the New York Public Library which contains his manuscripts, photos and letters.

Man, there's always something cool going on in NYC.