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 3, Chapters 1-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “The Angel's Game”
Part 3, Chapter 1 Summary
David learns that Sempere died of a heart attack following an argument with someone. As the undertakers take away his body, David sets his copy of Great Expectations into Sempere's hands.
Part 3, Chapter 2 Summary
At the end of Sempere's funeral, David approaches the gravesite to say goodbye. Suddenly, Pedro approaches him. David yells, "What did you promise her, to buy her back?" before punching Pedro in the face (487).
Part 3, Chapter 3 Summary
For the next several days, an increasingly embittered David does nothing but work on the manuscript: "The pages flowed from me without thought or measure, with nothing more than the desire to bewitch, or poison, hearts and minds" (490).
Part 3, Chapter 4 Summary
David learns from Isabella that the person arguing with Sempere before he died was an old woman who insisted on buying The Steps of Heaven, David's novel. Knowing that books have a soul and eager to protect David's, Sempere refused. Meanwhile, David learns from Barcelo that Pedro believes Cristina ran off with him, meaning that David's assumption that Cristina returned to Pedro is false.
Part 3, Chapter 5 Summary
While scouring the city for Cristina, David enters the Hotel España, where Pedro used to have a love nest. There, he runs into Corelli, who looks the same as always except he's no longer wearing the angel brooch that's usually pinned to his label. David says the book will be finished in two weeks.
At the opera house, David runs into Pep, who happens to mention how much Cristina missed her father in the days leading up to her disappearance. At that moment, David knows she's returned to the Villa San Antonio sanatorium.
Part 3, Chapter 6 Summary
On the way out of the opera house, David sees Grandes. To avoid him, David hides out in a cheap hotel for the night until he can catch the next train north to Villa San Antonio.
Part 3, Chapter 7 Summary
In a town north of Barcelona, David finds Villa San Antonio. When he demands to see Cristina, a man named Dr. Sanjuan asks, "Are you the writer?" (520). Dr. Sanjuan does not know what's wrong with Cristina but believes David's presence may help. When David enters her room, Cristina is strapped to a chair with bandages covering her arms from her wrists to her elbows. David hugs her, strokes her cheek, and asks her questions, but Cristina remains in a state of catatonia, "her eyes lost" (522).
Part 3, Chapter 8 Summary
David returns to town and books a room at the hotel. That evening in the dining room, Dr. Sanjuan approaches and explains that Cristina was found four weeks ago lying on her father's grave. The doctor says, "Every now and then, she regained consciousness, and when she did, she spoke about you" (524). She also believes something is inside her trying to destroy her.
The next day, David returns, but Cristina's condition is unchanged. When he asks what he should do when he's not at the sanatorium, Dr. Sanjuan says, "Write something for her" (530).
Part 3, Chapter 9 Summary
That night, David writes a story about the picture of Cristina with the stranger at the lake, suddenly emboldened by literature's power to heal. For four days, he writes at night then reads the pages to Cristina the next day. On the fifth day, Cristina is finally conscious and excited to see David, but her brain is still overrun with confusion.
That night, David is awoken at his hotel by Dr. Sanjuan, who says he must come to the sanatorium immediately. There, he finds Cristina with cuts all over her body and blood everywhere. To David, she repeats, "I didn't let him in" (536).
After being sedated for the night, Cristina wakes up in a far more lucid state. She tells David that he must destroy the book. When David says it's just a fable, Cristina says, "Don't lie to me. I've read it, David. At least enough to know that I had to destroy it" (538). The spent matches belonged to her, but before she could light the manuscript on fire, someone with "the eyes of a wolf" struck her unconscious (539). When David doubts this story and continues to insist on the manuscript's innocuousness, Cristina hisses, "Coward," and enters a shrieking frenzy.
Part 3, Chapter 10 Summary
Tormented by Cristina's words and his cowardly response to them, David vows to break Cristina out of the sanatorium. When he returns to the room, the window is open, and there are bloody footprints leading out. He follows the footprints to a frozen lake. Cristina is standing in the center of it. David begins to run toward her, but it is too late. Before the ice breaks and she falls to an icy death, Cristina smiles and says, "I love you" (544).
Part 3, Chapter 11 Summary
Worried that the doctors will hold him responsible, David runs to the train station to hide from authorities in a coach until the train departs. After a long journey, he arrives back in Barcelona on the day of his planned meeting with Corelli. Upstairs in his study, next to the manuscript and the spent matches, David finds Corelli's lost angel brooch. He grabs his father's pistol and heads to the meeting.
Part 3, Chapter 12 Summary
At the mansion, David finds what appears to be Corelli sitting in the dark. However, when he shoots Corelli, he finds that it is merely a wooden dummy filled with sand. Downstairs, he sees the operating table from his dream along with other dummies that share the likeness of Corelli's butler and chauffeur. David also finds one last unfinished dummy with half its face modeled after himself.
Upstairs, Corelli's dummy is gone. There is no longer a gap between the photographs in the corridor; rather, there is a new photograph of Cristina and a smiling Corelli with his arms around her.
Part 3, Chapter 13 Summary
Back in the city, David goes to Valera's office in a state of confusion and panic, but Valera is already at home. At gunpoint, he forces the secretary Margarita to phone Valera, who swears he's never met Corelli. He merely accepted advance payment anonymously from Corelli in return for releasing David from jail, should he be arrested. David threatens to kill Margarita if Valera doesn't look through his father's records at his house and find all payments or other ledger items related to Marlasca around the time of his death.
Part 3, Chapter 14 Summary
David arrives at Valera's house and finds him dead in his study, blood pouring from his eyes and a ledger book in front of him. In the book, David finds a number of payments from Marlasca's estate to various individuals, including Irene, Jaco, and the Sanabre & Sons stonemason's workshop. There's also a note about a physical exchange of cash made near Bogatell Beach, the purported home of the Witch of Somorrostro.
Before heading to Sanabre & Sons, David sees a series of photos of the elder Valera standing in front of his law firm next to a man who is clearly his partner, Diego Marlasca. David realizes in this moment that the man he knows as Ricardo Salvador is in fact Diego Marlasca, and furthermore he hasn't aged in 25 years.
Part 3, Chapters 1-14 Analysis
In Part 3's early chapters, the author further explores the idea that literature exists within its own theological framework. At Sempere's funeral, a priest says:
Señor Sempere believed that God lives, to a smaller or greater extent, in books, and that is why he devoted his life to sharing them, to protecting them, and to making sure their pages, like our memories and our desires, are never lost. He believed, and he made me believe it too, that as long as there is one person left in the world who is capable of reading them and experiencing them, a small piece of God, or of life, will remain (485).
This explains Sempere's connection to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books and suggests that the labyrinth is neither evil nor good. Rather, it is a place where the word of God and the word of the Devil coexist. Perhaps the author envisions the Cemetery as a sort of theological battlefield. The more books there are like David's The Steps to Heaven, the more good there is in the world. In turn, the more books like Lux Aeterna are on the shelves, the more evil there is in the world. If that's the case, David's manuscript would bring about evil not by finding its way into the hands of millions but simply by existing.
Indeed, while The Steps of Heaven is a work of love written for Cristina, the manuscript is a document of sheer hate. As David sits down to complete it in utter despair and hatred, he reaches a state of pure, honest creative expression that most artists dream of achieving. In David's case, however, this expression comes out demonic, suggesting a latent maliciousness existing in his soul all along: "The words and images sprang forth from my hands as if they'd been waiting angrily in the prison of my soul. The pages flowed from me without thought or measure, with nothing more than the desire to bewitch, or poison, hearts and minds. […] I was writing to set the world on fire and be consumed along with it" (489).
At heart, David is no longer a mere mercenary working off a debt to the Devil. Rather, the venom that flows from his fingers to the page is his soul's truest artistic expression. In light of the death and destruction his words ultimately contribute to across the world, this serves as a compelling argument that the value placed on soul-bearing honesty in artistic expression may be misguided and sometimes actively harmful to humanity. In other words, Barrido and Escobillas may be right about commercialized fiction being of more value to the world than true lasting art, at least for writers like David with malevolence in their hearts.
When Cristina reenters David’s life, however, the author offers a strong counterpoint to the idea that persuasive and resonant fiction is a tool of the Devil. In an effort to rouse Cristina from the catatonic state caused by her encounter with Corelli, David writes a story based on the old photograph of Cristina holding a stranger's hand. In the story, the girl escapes from a "dark maze of a town in which the streets and buildings were alive and fed on the souls of its inhabitants" (533)—a grim metaphor for the city of Barcelona, David's City of the Damned. After writing the first pages, David falls "fast asleep, for once dreaming and believing that words, even my own, had the power to heal (532). Indeed, the story manages to lift Cristina out of her dissociative state, emphasizing the extent to which David has been manipulated by Corelli into believing that fiction writing is chiefly a force of deception and malevolence, a lie that played on the most toxic elements of David's personality. He now learns, albeit too late, that storytelling can be therapeutic and profoundly transformational in a positive way.
However, when Cristina tells him to destroy the book, he continues to insist it's only a fable, gaslighting her despite the fact that she's read the cursed manuscript herself. Perhaps he refuses to burn it because he's afraid of what Corelli will do to him, but more likely it's his own vanity that stops him, the same vanity that makes him think of the book as his child in Part 2. David may have rediscovered the healing power of words, but he's still too vain to give up what he views to be his greatest creation.
Upon returning to Corelli's mansion to exact revenge for presumably stealing Cristina's soul, David finds everyone on the premises is a dummy—Corelli, the butlers, and the chauffeur. This discovery supports the theory that Corelli and the entire demonic scenario surrounding him is a creation of David's fevered imagination. For one, the dummies bring to mind David's early Mysteries of Barcelona series, in which the antagonist Baltasar Morel "lived in a subterranean mansion, staffed by automatons" (14). More broadly, the dummies represent fabrications of humans, much like characters in a book. It is as if David's imagination is bleeding into his own perceptions of the real world. Given this, David's discovery of a half-finished dummy of himself perhaps suggests that he doesn't truly know himself. He possesses a half-understanding at best, which would put him at a disadvantage as a true artist.
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By Carlos Ruiz Zafón
