The Shadow of the Wind

This novel celebrates many types of love: the love between fathers and sons, the romantic love between men and women, and the love between friends. This love extends from the Semperes’ taking Fermín into their lives and their family to the people in the Semperes’ neighborhood in Barcelona always rallying around a neighbor in need or taking care of each other through daily acts of kindness.

Specifically, the neighborhood’s treatment of Don Fernando, the watchmaker, exemplifies this spirit of love. When Don Fernando is arrested for cross-dressing and singing in a tavern, he is severely beaten by the police and thugs in the local jail and he nearly dies of his injuries. However, the people in his neighborhood—having long ago accepted Don Fernando’s harmless proclivities—take turns caring for him until he is well.

The two main romantic love stories— Julián and Penélope, in 1919, and Daniel and Bea, in 1954—have very different endings, primarily due to each young man’s response to disapproval of the young woman’s father, and the fathering that each young man has received. Daniel, loved and supported by a wonderful, caring father, attempts to directly interact with Bea’s father to gain his support for their relationship. Julián, degraded and humiliated by the hat maker, while not knowing who his real father was, escapes into fantasy and avoids reality at all costs. He never considers confronting Don Aldaya. His instinct is to run away from problems. This characteristic costs him dearly.

Other successful love stories include Daniel’s father and mother, Fermín and Bernarda, and Don Fernando and Merceditas.

Many characters exemplify and express extremes of hatred and cruelty, particularly Don Aldaya, Penélope’s father, Fumero, and Laín Coubert. Though Carax’s hatred consists primarily of self-loathing, he allows himself to grow embittered and to act out his hatred of Don Aldaya for the death of Penélope and their son through the murder of Jorge Aldaya and Fumero. In the form of his insane alter ego, Laín Coubert, Julián also kills Nuria’s lecherous boss, Sanmartí, among others. 

Destruction and disfiguration mark the usage of fire symbolically throughout the novel. By burning his own books, as the fictional devil Laín Coubert, Julián Carax preserves the mystery of his disappearance, which hides him from the evil policeman—Fumero, while wrecking a self-imposed vengeance upon his own literary career. Carax seems determined that his books should not survive him. Even after Carax is burned in the warehouse fire, he continues to smoke, and he shows his features to frighten people or to test them, as when he tests Daniel by showing him his face. Though fire can be life-sustaining, as when Daniel lights the boiler to heat the bathroom for his assignation with Bea, in this novel, the motif of fire is typically destructive.