The Guadalajara International Book Fair has as its guest the city of Barcelona, an icon of world literature. One of the great writers who also paid tribute to it through his work was Carlos Ruiz Zafón, who died in Los Angeles in 2020.
An echo of the literary universe recreated in his novels and a tribute to his readers. This is how Catalan writer Carlos Ruiz Zafón (1964-2020) conceived the book La ciudad de vapor (The City of Vapor) (Planeta), a collection of 11 stories, four of them unpublished, that recreate his native Barcelona, “the one he knew and the one he invented, fortunately for us, and invite us to revisit his work,” says Emili Rosales.
The Spanish editor states, in an interview with Excélsior, that the writer, who died on June 19 in Los Angeles, California (United States), where he had lived since 1994, decided to write “a kind of love letter” to his fans by bringing back some of his characters in different settings, “with the idea of reinforcing their faith in books and literature, and convincing them that culture remains central,” he says.
In the stories, “which intertwine with each other,” Ruiz Zafón recreates Barcelona in 1905, with its steam trains, fog, rain, and Gothic churches. “We see the Barcelona of the great bourgeois mansions, the narrow streets of a neighborhood under construction, the city as a kind of living being in the making, the port. We see characters capable of shedding their skin, of adopting another’s identity in order to survive. It’s a book that tells us a lot about his conception of language, the city, and the art of storytelling,” he explains.
Praised by Stephen King and considered the most widely read Spanish novelist after Miguel de Cervantes, Ruiz Zafón sold more than 15 million copies of The Shadow of the Wind (2001), the first work in the aforementioned quartet, which also includes The Angel’s Game (2008), The Prisoner of Heaven (2011), and The Labyrinth of Spirits (2016).
The editor emphasizes that in The City of Vapor, medieval Gothic literature and Barcelona’s Gothic architecture intersect. “He was struck by how Gaudí turns his gaze to medieval imagery in the 20th century, the exuberant rather than the rational, which is why he turns him into a character; he identified with him for his commitment to the unexpected.”
The man who worked for several years with the author of the trilogy The Prince of Mist (1993), The Midnight Palace (1994) and The Lights of September (1995) points out that “he loved music, he was a great music lover, a composer, and he was also fascinated by architecture and photography.”
