How A Book Can Change A Soul

what Carlos Ruiz Zafón taught me about my mysteries

Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.

I still remember the day my father took me to the annual book fair in Tirana and for the first time, I fell in love. It was more than a decade ago.

We used to go there every year. As a family of book producers, it was a tradition for us and we made sure not to miss it.

Imagine thousands of eye-catching covers and bombastic titles surrounding me and among them, a big advertisement reciting: The Angel’s Game. Carlos Ruiz Zafón.

I have always had a passion for angelic figures (I never knew why), so it attracted me from the start. Its snowy white cover with tints of grey, blue and black and a mysterious yet fascinating city in the background, made the rest.

Another tradition was leaving almost spaceless my grand library by adding to my father’s produced books of all authors and genres and the ones I bought during the year, at least a new one from the fair. I usually programmed in advance what I was about to get but this time I felt spontaneous.

And as it always happens with spontaneity, I didn’t get the book!

It was soon to be published. Despite it, they had another book from the same author which marked the beginning of the “Cemetery of Forgotten Books” series: The Shadow of the Wind.

They casually advised me to buy it and I casually did. I liked the title and the cover with that same aura of dread and light. I never thought I was going to fall in love and write about it more than a decade after.

Truth is I have been passionate about books ever since I was really small. I have always felt they are a part of me and I am a part of them, way before we started producing the magic of paper and letters.

But it wasn’t until I found The Shadow of the Wind that I understood how a book could read into someone’s soul and discover in it things that one never suspected he held there.

I have felt deep emotions and admired many authors and books but never really loved one until I followed the traces of Julián Carax in the Barcelona of the Civil War, next to Daniel and Fermín.

“I felt sure that the book had been waiting there for me for years.” — Daniel said. I knew it. I didn’t find the book. He found me. What for, I wasn’t sure.

Maybe I was cursed and broken like Julián, searching for the memory of the person I once was without ever grabbing it.

Or maybe I wanted to chase someone and solve their puzzle to help me solve mine and at the same time, save my soul from the degrading normality of the day by day life.

Maybe I wanted to break the golden cage I was accustomed to living and feel vulnerable and rebel and alive for the first time, like Bea.

Looking back at it, I think all the reasons were true but none of them was enough. Secretly I craved to solve my mysteries which I didn’t know that existed. But did.

Each one of us lives with his inner demons and dark places. Finding a way to face them without losing oneself in the fight, gives us enough motives to keep going forward amid adversities.

And then the other books came. New things to learn about myself and him, Zafón.

Falling in love for the first time is unforgettable but the second is the real experience, they say. And The Angel’s Game was the one.

Dark and profound as its main character David, as his enemy and benefactor Andreas Corelli. The complexity of being diverse. The pain and the cost of losing against those interior hellish forces attracted me fatally.

I never stopped until I finished Zafon’s last written book. First in Albanian and then in Spanish. Reading the author I adored the most in his native language was a symphony. Like Schubert’s Serenade. I owned the books he had written before and waited for years for the tetralogy to end. And eventually, it did.

We, humans, are willing to believe anything rather than the truth.

Reading a lot as I did, I convinced myself I could never write something that could pass the barriers of someone’s soul. Being a Remarque, a Dostojevskij, a Gabriel García Márquez was (and still is) unthinkable.

I was too afraid of failure but above all, I was petrified of exposing my bare soul and mind to an unmerciful public.

But it was with Zafón that I understood I could never be the writer I wanted to because I could never be him.

It was also with Zafón that I knew I wouldn’t be spared from suffering as much as I tried to avoid it. And even though I couldn’t be the writer I dreamed of, I had the moral obligation to be truthful. And write.

Through him, I knew we aren’t supposed to be afraid of being peculiarly strange, over-sensitive, semi-social. To be transparent or endure the hungry remorse for years to come. More on this here:

Zafón made me feel like Daniel, following his steps through the enchanted buildings and gothic streets of Barcelona. Twice. Up and Down from Tibidabo to La Rambla. From Plaza Real to Calle Santa Ana. From Barceloneta to Montjuic and inside the very Els Quatre Gats.

I was ecstatic to think about what lesson he would have taught me next. What place I would visit next and then I saw it. The last game of the Angel.

He left us on a Friday. Without any bold announcements. Taking away all the answers.

I always dreamed of meeting him once in my lifetime, under the breathtaking Barcelona sky. “We only remember what never happened.” he once said in Marina. And I can now fully understand what it meant…