Zafón's Intertextuality

The first sentence of Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s La sombra del viento, a book I’d started knowing little about, reads: Todavía recuerdo el día que mi padre me llevó por primera vez al cementerio de los libros olvidados. Familiar and resonant ¹, this Gothic remix of Cien anos de soledad’s opener² sends the reader down an intertextual rabbit-hole. Just a few pages further in, and we find ourselves in an impossible library filled with forgotten books and mirrored galleries. The references and Borgesian symbols aren’t subtle: Zafón is taking the postmodern approach by making La sombra del viento that which it describes: a library of other works, a nesting doll of stories.

If the cementerio del los libros olvidados is our Library of Babel, La sombra is a sort of literary Book-Man: a book that is the cipher and perfect compendium of all other books. Or, perhaps, one link in the literary chain leading to some platonic ur book? Someone proposed searching by regression: To locate book A, first consult book B, which tells where book A can be found; to lo cate book B, first consult book C, and so on, to infinity.³ To put a close on it, Zafón’s use of explicit intertextuality elevates La sombra. It explodes the scope, expanding what is ostensibly a single book into an entire metafictional library. As a reader, I found it to be a heady experience of recursive stories and symbols drawn from the Spanish literary canon.