71 pages • 2 hours read
Carlos Ruiz ZafónThe Angel's Game
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2008A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 1-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “City of the Damned”
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary
The year is 1917, and 17-year-old David Martín is an assistant at the Voice of Industry newspaper in Barcelona, Spain. Deputy editor Don Basilio Moragas gives David six hours to write a crime fiction story for the back page. Of his first paid writing assignment, David recalls, "A writer is condemned to remember that moment, because from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price" (3).
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary
Over the next year, David's weekly column, The Mysteries of Barcelona, becomes a massive hit, causing many of his co-workers to envy and resent him. The exception is Don Pedro Vidal, whose family owns the newspaper and who gave David his first assistant job. One day, Pedro arrives at David's dingy flat to deliver a package addressed to David at the office: a white envelope sealed in wax with the stamp of an angel. Inside is a letter from an anonymous fan complimenting David on his writing and inviting him to enjoy a surprise at El Ensueño, a high-class bordello in Barcelona's red-light district.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary
At the El Ensueño bordello, the matron tells David that "Chloe will be with you presently" (32). Chloe is also the name of the 17-year-old femme fatale who serves as the heroine of The Mysteries of Barcelona. After being led to a dark room and locked inside, David notices there is another person in the room. "It was her. My Chloe" (33). The two have sex, and David falls asleep in Chloe's arms.
When David wakes up, Chloe is gone. He finds a business card belonging to a man named Andreas Corelli, the editor of the Parisian publishing house Éditions de la Lumière, along with a note that reads: "Dear David, life is filled with great expectations. When you are ready to make yours come true, get in touch with me. I'll be waiting" (36).
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary
Unable to shake the memory of Chloe and the night they shared, David returns to El Ensueño three days later. He finds the bordello in ruins, with thick layers of dust covering piles of rubble. The bartender at the café across the street tells David that El Ensueño closed 15 years ago after a fire blazed through the building, killing six people.
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary
The story flashes back to David's early life with his father. His mother abandons the family when David is four, two years after his father returns from the Philippines War a broken man. Bitter and abusive, David's father begins to associate with a bad crowd of old war buddies who get him involved in criminal activities and intravenous drug use. David's only respite from his hellish home life is literature. His favorite book is Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, a gift given to him by a kindly bookseller named Sempere.
Late one night, David's father comes home and flies into a rage because his son is wasting electricity by reading at night. He beats David savagely, breaking two of his teeth and demanding to know where he's been hiding the book. David refuses to tell, and in the morning, he grabs Great Expectations and runs to the Sempere & Sons bookstore, still bloody. Sempere carries the boy upstairs, calls a doctor, and promises that when David is older, he will show him a secret place where books never die.
Appearing to turn things around, David's father obtains legitimate employment as a night watchman at the Voice of Industry newspaper. One night outside the office, the father's sins catch up to him. He is gunned down by hoodlums in front of a 14-year-old David, who holds his father as he bleeds to death. Two weeks later, David is discovered hiding by the newspaper presses, still covered in his father's blood. Pedro takes pity on the boy and offers him a job at the newspaper as an assistant.
With the money he's saved from his meager salary, David hopes to finally buy his bloodstained copy of Great Expectations, but Sempere tells him he sold it that very morning.
Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary
Despite the success of The Mysteries of Barcelona, Pedro orders that David be fired. He later explains to David that he is too good a crime fiction writer to work for the Voice of Industry and promises to connect him with a publishing house.
Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary
A few months after his 20th birthday, David accepts a contract with the publishing house Barrido and Escobillas to write penny dreadfuls, a genre of cheap crime and horror literature popular in Europe at that time. Under the pseudonym Ignatius B. Samson, David creates a new crime series called City of the Damned. While the contract is lucrative, the work is extraordinarily taxing, as David is forced to write 6.66 pages a day to keep up with the demands of his unscrupulous publishers.
Part 1, Chapter 8 Summary
With the money he's earned writing City of the Damned, David decides to finally move out of his dilapidated apartment. He finds himself eerily drawn to a gloomy Gothic house with a tower on top that's been abandoned for 20 years. Signing a 10-year rental agreement, David perches himself in the study atop the tower surrounded by the sordid city on all sides.
Every night from dusk until dawn, David throws himself into his work, fueled by coffee and cigarettes. As the days pass, he begins to suffer severe headaches and recurring nightmares about his work.
A year passes, and David receives a white package sealed with the same red angel insignia as the mysterious invitation to El Ensueño. The package contains his old bloodstained copy of Great Expectations that Sempere sold years before.
Part 1, Chapter 9 Summary
At Sempere & Sons, David runs into Cristina Sagnier, Pedro's assistant and the daughter of Pedro's driver, Manuel. David has long been infatuated with Cristina, "a creature of pale skin and well-defined lips who was a couple of years older than me and had taken my breath away" (27). Though Cristina is polite with David, she doesn't seem to reciprocate his affection.
Part 1, Chapter 10 Summary
One night, Pedro invites David to join him and Cristina—who it becomes increasingly clear are romantically involved—to the opera. Left alone for a few moments in the opera box, David asks Cristina why she doesn't want to be his friend. She replies, "Because you don't want to be my friend, either" (86), suggesting that she knows he is in love with her.
On David's 28th birthday, Pedro throws him a party. Away from the other guests, Cristina says she wants to meet David the next day without Pedro knowing. She kisses him on the cheek.
Part 1, Chapter 11 Summary
The next day at the tower house, Cristina tells David that Pedro is torturing himself over his new novel, having written and destroyed at least 200 pages. David says he has a plan to help Pedro without him knowing.
Part 1, Chapter 12 Summary
Every afternoon, Cristina and David look over Pedro's pages, which tell the multi-generational story of a Barcelona family. In fact, the idea is one David initially suggested that Pedro pursue. The work itself, however, is poorly executed, and David finds that he must essentially rewrite the entire book himself. When Cristina raises concerns that Pedro will know the book's been rewritten and discover their deception, David explains, "Never underestimate a writer's vanity, especially that of a mediocre writer" (98).
To keep up with both his penny dreadfuls and Pedro's book, David only sleeps three hours a night. His headaches worsen, and he becomes dependent on codeine painkillers. One night, while wandering the city in a daze, David collapses after nearly getting hit by a tram.
Part 1, Chapter 13 Summary
While David is unconscious, someone mistakes him for an indigent and delivers him to a homeless shelter. Compelled by strange forces, David climbs the staircase to the roof. There, a shadowy figure of a man approaches David, frightening him and nearly causing him to fall off the roof before the man catches him. When David asks the man what brought him here, he replies, "The same thing as you: great expectations" (105). It is then that David knows the man is Andreas Corelli, the mysterious publisher sending him letters.
Corelli says he wants to commission David to spend a year writing a book, adding that his lawyers can easily get him out of his current exclusive contract with Barrido and Escobillas. In return, David will receive 100,000 francs, a small fortune. Corelli says he doesn't need an answer now and that he's certain David will agree the next time they meet. When David asks if there will be a next time, Corelli replies, "There always is" (110).
Part 1, Chapters 1-13 Analysis
As early as Chapter 3, the author introduces events that appear to be either of supernatural origin or illusions propagated by the narrator and protagonist's disturbed and possibly psychotic brain. The earliest instance comes when David returns to the El Ensueño bordello three days after enjoying a sensual night with Chloe—one of the characters from his crime series—to find it in ruins.
This question of whether what David sees is "real," the result of mental illness, or both, is never fully settled. As a result, each fantastical event carries mythological, metaphorical, and psychological implications, depending on how the reader interprets the work. For example, if David is merely insane, then the fact that he chooses the image of one of his own fictional creations as the woman to whom he loses his virginity is extraordinarily telling of the massive level of vanity David exhibits as a writer. Even if Chloe is "real," so to speak—one of the automatons Corelli is able to conjure—the fact that Corelli summons the image of Chloe rather than, say, David's real-life love Cristina speaks to the fact that Corelli knows precisely how to pull David under his spell: through vanity. David himself addresses this character flaw—one he believes belongs to all writers—in the book's ominous first lines:
A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story. He will never forget the sweet poison of vanity in his blood[...]. A writer is condemned to remember that moment, because from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price (3).
The El Ensueño bordello scenes also introduce the Charles Dickens book Great Expectations as a symbol that with recur throughout the novel. Published in 1861, Great Expectations tells the story of a young impoverished orphan named Pip who works to become a gentleman thanks to the patronage of a mysterious and generous benefactor. It is easy to see why such a narrative would appeal to young David, who is born into poverty and lives a hellish existence with his abusive, drug-addicted father. "It was a rainy winter, with days as gray as lead, and I read Great Expectations about nine times, partly because I had no other book at hand, partly because I did not think there could be a better one in the world and I was beginning to suspect that Mr. Dickens had written it just for me" (46).
However, unlike Pip, whose patronage comes as a result of a kind deed, David obtains himself a benefactor out of sheer misfortune. The hoodlums who kill David's father do so because they mistake him for Pedro, compelling Pedro to care for David and foster his career. For that reason, David never truly earns the "great expectations" he has for himself and his career. And while he does endeavor to pay back the debt he owes to Pedro—albeit only at Cristina's urging—there's an air of unearned entitlement to David's literary ambitions. This is perhaps why Corelli leans so heavily on the Great Expectations references in his missives to David, as doing so appeals to his original sin of vanity.
These chapters also begin to explore the political turmoil surrounding Spain in the years leading up the Spanish Civil War—turmoil that will have enormous thematic resonance in the novel. Already by 1914, the year of David's father's death:
[…] bloodshed and violence were beginning to be everyday occurrences in Barcelona. Days of pamphlets and bombs that left strewn bodies shaking and smoking in the streets of the Raval quarter, of gangs of black figures who prowled about at night maiming and killing, of processions and parades of saints and generals who reeked of death and deceit, of inflammatory speeches in which everyone lied and everyone was right. The anger and hatred that years later would lead such people to murder one another in the name of grandiose slogans and colored rags could already be smelled in the poisoned air. […] Those were years when one grew up fast, and with childhood slipping out of their hands, many children already had the look of old men (55).
While much of this violence is the result of crimes of opportunity as Spain's economy was in a significant economic slump, the overall turmoil was very much political in nature. By remaining neutral during World War I, Spain saw its exports rise dramatically. Virtually all the benefits from this trade surplus, however, went to the wealthy and middle classes, exacerbating income inequality. Led by anarchists and Communists, the poor and working class began to make demands of the land-owning elite, often resulting in strikes in Barcelona and across Spain. During one 1917 strike, the government sent soldiers with machine guns to break up the demonstrators, killing 70. It is this very social and political unrest that Corelli seeks to exacerbate and exploit with his new "religion," as will be shown in later chapters. Moreover, by highlight "slogans" and "inflammatory speeches in which everyone lied and everyone was right" (55), the author implicates both ideology and fiction as sources of the violence, signaling a recurring theme that words and narrative can inspire people to commit atrocities.
The author also explores political ideology as a corrosive force in Chapter 13 when David wakes up in a homeless shelter after nearly being killed by a tram. An old man in rags tells David, "It seems that in the advanced stages of stupidity, a lack of ideas is compensated for by an excess of ideologies" (102). Indeed, throughout the book, both the author and the narrator view ideology—religious, political, or otherwise—with deep suspicion. Unlike ideas or true intelligence, ideologies in the world of the novel serve largely to drive individuals into tribes so that they may be more easily manipulated by those in power. This particular quote refers to the dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera, which lasted from 1923 to 1930, roughly the timeframe of most of the book. Primo de Rivera's reign was deeply rooted in ideology in the sense that he rose to power on the back of idealistic manifestos and speeches, only to fail to deliver on most of his reforms, leading to ever more social unrest and violence. This reference reflects the connection between ideological narratives and violence that emerges again and again in The Angel's Game.
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By Carlos Ruiz Zafón
