CARLOS RUIZ ZAFÓN’S LA SOMBRA DEL VIENTO: RE-WRITING FICTIONS OF
DETECTION AS TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY MASS MARKET LITERATURE
DR SHELLEY GODSLAND. UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND.
sgodsland@hotmail.com
Ruiz Zafón’s La sombra del viento (2002) has achieved extraordinary bestseller status in
Spain and worldwide, and has functioned to raise international awareness of contemporary
Spanish literary endeavour (see: Suárez 2004).
Critical responses to the novel in the press and media both inside Spain and elsewhere have
tended to be positive, and flag up the work as a well written, engaging narrative that deals,
variously, with the nation’s recent past (specifically the Civil War), the multiple geographies
of Barcelona, or the form and function of books and readerly relationships to them.
Similarly, academic studies that analyse La sombra del viento have approached the text as ‘a
book about books’ (Ellis 2006; d’Humières 2007), have read it as a reinscription of the norms
of extant literary genres – most noticeably the gothic and related detective forms (Branneis
2008; Padilla Mangas 2006; Steen 2008; Trotman 2007), or consider it as part of the current
cultural trend characterised by a questing and questioning return to Spain’s recent past (Saíz
Ripoll 2004).
While our study of Ruiz Zafón’s text will develop some of these notions, we posit that the
author utilises this particular work not only to re-write genre fiction (the detective text) as a
vehicle for recuperation and analysis of twentieth-century Spanish history, but also deploys it
as a carefully crafted literary device to engage with notions of mass culture as they pertain to
Spain, concerns which in turn, we suggest, are in fact central to his wider narrative project.
Using the work of Adorno and Horkheimer as the basis of our theoretical apparatus, we
propose that Ruiz Zafón ludically queries the form and function of mass culture as
conceptualised by these two members of the Frankfurt School in particular, and that the
Spanish novelist explores notions of culture of the masses as it was manifested in the Spain of
the Civil War and dictatorship, and also in the contemporary nation in which La sombra del
viento was published.
BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS:
Dr Shelley Godsland is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) at the University of
Birmingham, England. She previously worked at Royal Holloway, University of London, the
University of Liverpool, and Manchester Metropolitan University. She has published
extensively in the fields of Hispanic women’s writing, and detective fiction from Spain and
Latin America.