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 14-25Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “City of the Damned”
Part 1, Chapter 14 Summary
Alarmed by his near brush with death, David finally sees a physician, a man named Dr. Trias. After running tests, Dr. Trias informs David that he has an inoperable brain tumor and that he has no more than a year and a half to live. The symptoms, the doctor adds, will only increase. When David asks if he'll still be able to write, Dr. Trias says, "You won't even be able to think about writing" (114).
Part 1, Chapter 15 Summary
Faced with this grim prognosis, David decides to bury Ignatius B. Samson once and for all, refusing to write another word of his latest City of the Damned installment and tossing the existing pages into the fire. In an effort to placate David, his publishers Barrido and Escobillas’s offer to give him a nine-month sabbatical during which he will write his own novel under his own name, which they promise to publish.
Over the next nine months, David barely sleeps, writing Pedro's novel by day and his own novel by night. He learns from Pedro's assistant, Pep, that Cristina's father, Manuel, suffered a debilitating aneurysm and that Cristina is with him at a sanatorium north of Barcelona called Villa San Antonio.
Part 1, Chapter 16 Summary
David finally finishes both novels. His feeling of triumph is abated when he learns from Pep that Manuel is dead. Pep is on the way to pick up Cristina from the train station, but David says he will go instead. When they meet, Cristina can't face Pedro and her home yet, and so they go to David's instead. There, they look at family pictures, including one at the sea of Cristina at age seven, holding the hand of a stranger whose face can't be seen. As the moment grows more intimate, Cristina confesses that she resisted her attraction to David because of the debt they both owe to Pedro: "Our lives don't belong to us. Not mine, not my father's, not yours" (134). David replies, "Everything belongs to Vidal," to which Cristina says, "Not today" (134). The two have sex, even though David knows he will lose Cristina as soon as the night is over.
Part 1, Chapter 17 Summary
Nine weeks later, endless copies of Pedro Vidal's new book, The House of Ashes, line the storefronts of Barcelona's booksellers. Meanwhile, David struggles to find a copy of his book, The Steps of Heaven, at any bookstore in town. At a newsstand, David reads review after review proclaiming Pedro's book "a classic." In turn, he can only find a handful of short reviews for his book, the kindest of which refers to it as "a first novel written in a pedestrian style" (138). At his publishing house, David is furious to learn that Barrido and Escobillas only ordered a 500-copy run. Escobillas says, "If only you'd written a book like the one your friend Vidal has written" (140). When Barrido asks when they can expect the next Ignatius B. Samson installment, David says, "You can go screw yourselves" (141).
Part 1, Chapter 18 Summary
With an intimidating lawyer in tow, Barrido and Escobillas arrive at the tower house to inform David that he must get back to work writing City of the Damned books within a week or he will be found in breach of contract. On their way out, David tells Escobillas, "In a week you and that idiot partner of yours will be dead" (145).
At a supposedly celebratory dinner Pedro and David had planned for when their books are published, Pedro says he has two things he needs to get off his chest. The first is that the men who killed David's father did so by mistake. They intended to kill Pedro, who had been sleeping with the wife of a crime boss. Therefore, Pedro acted as David's benefactor not out of sheer altruism but out of guilt. The second thing he tells David is that he and Cristina are engaged.
Devastated, David finds himself walking to the fabric store owned by his estranged mother. Too afraid to talk to her himself, he pays a young boy to give her a copy of The Steps of Heaven as she leaves her store. As David watches from the far end of the street, he sees his mother toss the book in a garbage can.
Part 1, Chapter 19 Summary
At Sempere & Sons, David asks Sempere about the secret place he'd mentioned long ago where books can never die. He leads David to a staircase tucked away in an alley leading to a door with a brass knocker emblazoned with a demon's face. The man who answers the door is Isaac Monfort, referred to as "the keeper of this place" (156). Inside is a colossal labyrinth of shelves containing hundreds of thousands of books. Isaac says, "Welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books" (158).
Part 1, Chapter 20 Summary
Isaac explains the rules of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. The first time visitors arrive, they may choose any book to take with them as long as they promise to protect it at all costs. Moreover, absolute secrecy must be maintained regarding the cemetery, as only around a hundred people in the world know of the place's existence. Finally, he says, "try not to get lost" (161). Legend has it that a man in black stalks the shelves. Some say he's the ghost of a writer whose book somebody lost, while others say he is the master of this place, "the angel of lies and of the night" (162).
Part 1, Chapter 21 Summary
After placing his own book on the shelves, David is drawn to a particularly rough-looking volume. The cover is too worn to read, but inside he sees a title page: "Lux Aeterna, D.M." (164). Struck by the fact that the author shared his initials, David pores through the contents of the book, which appear to be made up of strange prayers and catechisms written in no less than five different languages. As he leaves that section of the labyrinth and eventually the Cemetery altogether, he doesn't realize the book is still in his hands.
Part 1, Chapter 22 Summary
On his way from the book labyrinth, David’s pain and nausea are so severe that he barely makes it back to the tower house. There, he finds a new letter from Corelli setting a meeting in seven days. David spends the next week in a state of agony and delirium, unsure if he will survive long enough for the meeting.
Part 1, Chapter 23 Summary
On the afternoon of the meeting, Pedro and Cristina marry. David watches from afar, silently cursing them. Back at the tower house, David loads his father's pistol and places the barrel to his temple. As he begins to draw back the hammer, the windows fly open from a gust of wind, "the lost breath of great expectations" (172).
Part 1, Chapter 24 Summary
That night, David takes a taxi to a deserted estate on the outskirts of town for his meeting with Corelli. Outside, three dogs would have mauled him had the house's lights not turned on and driven them away. The door is unlocked, and David enters a corridor with old photographs lining the walls evenly, save for an ominous gap between two of them.
Suddenly, Corelli is next to David, inviting him to join him in the next room for some wine. They sit in armchairs across from one another, and Corelli explains what type of book he wants David to write: "I want you to create a religion for me" (179). In disbelief, David tells Corelli he's got the wrong writer and somewhat derisively adds, "I hope you find your man and that the pamphlet is a success" (180). But when David gets up to leave, Corelli tells him he knows he's dying but that he has a way to cure him. With tears in his eyes, David tells Corelli, "I accept" and falls asleep in the armchair, an envelope of 100,000 francs in his hand.
Part 1, Chapter 25 Summary
While passed out in the armchair, David dreams that the house slowly sinks into water until the entire room is submerged. He swims down basement stairs and arrives at an operating table surrounded by doctors all with Dr. Trias's face. They proceed to cut open his head and pull out a black spider with an angel on its carapace.
Around noon the next day, David wakes up to find that the pain and pressure in his head is gone. He begins to climb the stairs in search of Corelli but stops, sensing "a heavy, impenetrable darkness" beyond (190). David leaves the house and walks back toward the city, "certain that, for the first time in a long while, perhaps for the first time in my whole life, the world was smiling at me" (190).
Part 1, Chapters 14-25 Analysis
David's near-death experience by the rails is a profound turning point for his character. This event is remarkably similar to the real-life death of the Spanish-Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí and even takes place around the same year. In June of 1926, Gaudí was struck by a tram while on a walk. Due to his shabby attire and lack of identification, he was mistaken for an indigent or drunkard and left to die, much like David. Only later did Gaudí receive rudimentary care, but by that point it was too late. Similarities also exist between the men's personalities: Like David, Gaudí came from humble beginnings and committed himself entirely to his work, falling in love with only one woman who did not reciprocate his feelings. Keeping in mind that David is an unreliable narrator and perhaps the victim of a psychotic break, it is possible that he sees himself in Gaudí's image: a poor boy with great expectations who rose to the top of his craft on the back of his talent and dedication.
When describing this turning point following the accident on the rails, David frames it as the death of Ignatius B. Samson and the birth or rebirth of David Martín:
Ignatius B. Samson had been left lying on the rails in front of that tram, exhausted, his soul bled dry, poured into too many pages that should never have seen the light of day. But before departing he had conveyed to me his last wishes: that I should bury him without any fuss and that, for once in my life, I should have the courage to use my own voice (115).
David thus positions this act of death and rebirth as a conflict between commercial writing and true art.
However, when Martín announces the death of Ignatius to Barrido and Escobillas, they make a mockery of David's ambitions, along with those of any so-called true artists who seek to express themselves for reasons beyond mere commercial interests. Barrido says, "You're an artist and you want to make art, high literature that springs from your heart and will engrave your name in golden letters on the steps of history" (119), to which David responds, "The way you put it makes it sound ridiculous" (119), and Escobillas adds, "Because it is" (119). At this point in the narrative, the attitude of Barrido and Escobillas sounds extraordinarily cynical. As the book progresses, however, and the fruits of David's devotion to self-expression in pursuit of an artist legacy turn rotten, it almost feels as if the author himself sympathizes with the publishers' sardonic view on the matter. After all, a silly detective yarn isn't going to start a war or crush its author's psyche.
The book also begins to explore the idea of indebtedness with more detail when Cristina tacitly expresses her feelings for David but explains why they cannot act on them past one night: "Because our lives don't belong to us. Not mine, not my father's, not yours" (134). This quote expresses the extent to which benefactors, despite their generosity, possess a sort of control over the recipients of this generosity. This theme is complicated by the revelation that Pedro was the target of the gunmen who killed David's father. As such, Pedro's patronage of David is driven not by pure saintly altruism nor even sheer pity, but rather guilt and remorse over his own sins, which caused him to become a target. David's own sense of indebtedness to Pedro—which drives him to all but write Pedro's novel for him—is thus a false obligation: David already paid his debt when he lost his father. Meanwhile, Cristina's own need to repay her debt causes her to marry Pedro not out of love but out of obligation, with tragic results forthcoming.
These chapters also introduce one of central symbolic constructions of the author's entire book series: the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. While the kindly Sempere introduces David to the labyrinth of books, the aura the author builds around the Cemetery suggests that it is a place of dread and evil:
The floor we were stepping over sown with tombstones, their inscriptions, crosses, and faces dissolving into the stone. The keeper stopped and lowered the gas lamp so that the light slid over some of the pieces of the macabre puzzle (159).
Then there are the rumors of the man in black who supposedly haunts the Cemetery. Isaac explains:
The man in black is the master of this place, the father of all secret and forbidden knowledge, of wisdom and memory, the bringer of light to storytellers and writers since time immemorial. He is our guardian angel, the angel of lies and of the night (162).
The phrase "bringer of light" has clear occult connotations as it is the literal English translation of "Lucifer" in Latin. Moreover, by placing the guardian of the Cemetery in these terms, the author highlights the theme that there's something inherent Satanic about the art of fiction.
At one point David thinks he sees the man in black, but it is really his own reflection in the mirror. This is one of the strongest pieces of evidence in the book that the Satan-like figure of Corelli is a manifestation of David's own cracked psyche. Moreover, the notion that all of the murders that take place in the novel are actually the work of David himself is supported by his out-of-nowhere threat to Barrido and Escobillas: "'In a week you and that idiot partner of yours will be dead,' I replied calmly, without quite knowing why I'd uttered those words" (145).
Before David's meeting with Corelli, the Great Expectations symbol reemerges, this time during an aborted suicide attempt. As David readies himself to pull the trigger of a gun pressed against his head, he feels "a gust of wind whipping against the tower and the study windows burst open, hitting the wall with great force. An icy breeze touched my face, bringing with it the lost breath of great expectations" (172). His writerly ambitions—born while reading Dickens but stoked by Corelli through appeals to David's vanity—appear to save him from committing suicide.
At the end of Part 1, David finally visits Corelli's mansion—which is designed by the architect Gaudí. If there is still any question that Corelli is a demonic creature of the night, the final chapters of Part 1 eliminate all doubt. Outside the mansion, three dogs attempt to maul David in what is a clear reference to Cerberus, a three-headed dog from Greek mythology that guards the gates of Hell. In the foyer are photographs of individuals whose eyes cry out silently for help, displayed like trophies: "They stared at the camera with a longing that chilled my blood" (176). The meeting is also rich with angel imagery—including Corelli's angel brooch—recalling the interpretation by early Christian writers of Satan as a fallen angel. There's even an angel on the underside of the spider the doctors remove from David's head when he dreams, suggesting that Corelli himself is responsible for the tumor.
And then there is Corelli's offer, which recalls the deal Faust makes with the Devil in German folklore: He will magically cure David's brain tumor if David writes him a religion. When David suggests that Corelli hire a theologian rather than a fiction writer to create his religion, Corelli says, "Everything is a tale, Martín. What we believe, what we know, what we remember, even what we dream. […] We only accept as true what can be narrated" (180). This statement reinforces a dominant theme explored in the novel: that in a universe full of mystery, humanity behaves not in accordance with objective verifiable truth but with emotional truth, which is best conveyed through fiction writing.
Related Titles
By Carlos Ruiz Zafón
