posted on 26 Jun 2023

The City of Mist by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

When a much admired author dies comparatively young – Zafon was just 55 when he succumbed to cancer – there’s always a temptation for the literary executors to rummage around and see if there is one final posthumous book that can be found in the author’s notes and unfinished scraps. However much you like an author, there’s always a danger that this will detract from rather than add to the legacy.

So, it was with some trepidation that I finally gave in and picked up The City of Mist, a collection of short stories released in 2021. I am a great lover of the four volume novel cycle that is usually referred to as The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, which includes the hugely popular Shadow of the Wind. The four books are carefully constructed to be free-standing novels that are referential of each other but so artfully written that they can be read in any order and still make sense. As this suggests, Zafon was an obsessive artist, writing and rewriting, agonising over structure and choosing exactly the right words – and this is something that puts even more pressure on anyone charged with bringing any work of his posthumously into the public sphere.

Given all these concerns, it was a relief to find that much of what has been collected here is worthy of Zafon’s reputation and has all the satisfying hallmarks of the writers obsession with books, architecture, Barcelona and the Gothic imagination. Clearly, when he was alive, Zafon used the short story form to sketch out some of the ideas that would find a more rounded existence in the longer novels but they also seemed to be the vehicle that allowed him to have a bit of fun. It’s not hard to imagine him smiling to himself as he considers what it might be right to reimagine some episodes from the great Cervantes or to concoct a tale in which the great architect of Barcelona, Antonio Gaudi, crosses the ocean to see what he can add to the skyline of New York.

The title of the book, The City of Mist, is itself a reference to Zafon’s mysterious – and frequently Gothic – Barcelona, a place full of cobbled streets, moody lighting, gargoyles shrouded in fog, ancient byways that “intertwined to form a knot of incomprehensible passages, arches and curves where the sun barely penetrated more than a few minutes a day.”

Aficionados of The Cemetery of Forgotten Books will immediately spot the stories that have familiar characters and will also welcome the tale of how the great labyrinth was initially designed and found its way to Spain. But there are also new characters here and a willingness to experiment – although to be truthful, these are some of the least successful elements in the mixture.

The final story, a cunning piece of placing by the editorial team, is entitled Two-Minute Apocalypse and is virtually a modern-day fairy tale in which Zafon explores what might be the meaning of life, the nature of love and where the best chocolate ice-cream can be found. Finding the answers, Zafon tells us, is the true route to happiness.

The majority of the stories have been translated from Spanish by Lucia Graves but Zafon himself translated two of them and actually wrote one in English. It’s a tribute to Graves that there doesn’t seem to be much of a seam between the stories in terms of style and readability.

Both hardback and paperback editions are readily available and – oddly enough – on the second-hand market, there’s not much to choose between them in terms of price.

 

Terry Potter

June 2023