Marina

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Carlos Ruiz Zafón unleashes all his Gothic storytelling magic in this tale set in 1980s Barcelona. It’s a coming-of-age story and mystery draped in atmosphere. If this book were a person, it would be a mysterious figure sweeping around corners in a hooded black velvet cloak.

The story begins with a prologue narrated by our hero Oscar, a 30-year-old man reflecting on his past. He ends with these words, ‘We all have a secret buried under lock and key in the attic of our soul. This is mine.’

With that, we jump back in time to when 15-year-old Oscar was a student at a Barcelona boarding school. He’s mostly indifferent to his classes and fellow students, held in thrall to his dreamy, romantic side. Each day, he bides his time in the classroom until the few hours before dinner, when he can escape the school’s gate into the city’s winding twilight alleys. He’s particularly drawn to a neighborhood of abandoned gardens and crumbling mansions.

One day, while looking at a house he describes as ‘rather sinister, even for my taste,’ he hears a beautiful voice singing. He follows the sound through an iron gate, past a moldering fountain, and into the open doors of a sitting room. The song comes from a gramophone, a gold pocket watch with cracked glass and stopped hands sitting at its side. As Oscar examines the watch, a frightening figure leaps out from the gloom. Without thinking, Oscar flees, the watch still in his hand. That accidental theft is the catalyst for everything that follows, including Oscar’s introduction to a beautiful young girl named Marina and her father, an artist with a broken heart.

Marina invites Oscar on a cryptic adventure, leading him to the Sarriá cemetery where, on the last Sunday of every month, at precisely 10:00 in the morning, a woman dressed in a black cloak arrives by carriage and places a single red rose on an unmarked grave. On this Sunday, the new friends follow the unknown woman and are soon caught up in a mystery tinged with grand love affairs, betrayal, obsession, and sorrow.

The plot bobs and weaves in a satisfying way, intercutting scenes of found family and domesticity with white-knuckle action and spine-tingling suspense. A key set piece in a greenhouse dances right up to the edge of nightmare territory; it’s deliciously unpleasant. It all feels as if Zafón read Frankenstein, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and The Fault in our Stars, then fell asleep watching Pan’s Labyrinth and had a vivid dream he turned into a novel.

But the cliffhanger plot points are merely a trick to get you to read what Zafón really cares about: stories of cursed characters and their undoing.

This is melodramatic and melancholy, a big adventure and a sweet story about the family we choose. It will transport you to a pleasantly crumbling version of Barcelona and an unforgettable Gothic cemetery.

The Sarriá cemetery is one of Barcelona’s best-hidden corners. If you look for it on the map, you won’t find it. If you ask locals or taxi drivers how to get there, they probably won’t know, although they’ve all heard about it. And if, by chance, you try to look for it on your own, you’re more likely than not to get lost. The lucky few who know the secret of its whereabouts suspect that this old graveyard is in fact an island lost in the ocean of the past, which appears and disappears at random. — Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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