prisoner of heaven

I picked this book up at the library book sale because I recognized the author's name, and was pretty sure I'd read one of his books. Carlos Ruiz Zafon may be a prolific writer, but perhaps not all of his books are translated and brought to the US, what do I know. The title credits in the frontmatter of the hardcover I just read only list a few books.

I think the book I read was The Shadow of the Wind,* which is part of Ruiz's Cemetery of Lost Books series, as is this one: The Prisoner of Heaven. The way the series is described on the book jacket, these stories are related, but they don't need to be read in order. Which is probably good, as I don't think I've read any of the intervening books.

This was good. A fast read, pulled me right in. I read a lot more of this one at each siting than I did the last one. see below The story was dark, a little Gothic, romantic, sweet, sad, with a little intrigue, and glimpses at larger unseen things in the background.

The translation was done by Lucia Graves, and it appears to be British rather than North American English. After a quick look, Graves is indeed English, and a writer herself. She's also translated a lot of her father's works (Robert Graves.) I liked the translation. Sometimes translations are obvious, they seem to be a separate thing, that kind of floats over the author's work, and obscures as much it reveals. I like how Graves translates the feeling, or the meaning, rather than just the words. She finds idioms and phrases that may not match word-for-word what Ruiz has written, but they do match what he means, or needs to convey in the story. Brava Lucia Graves.




Unrelated: So, where have I been for over a month? Reading has been difficult with my house under construction; its hard to find books that are either packed away or hidden behind piles of stuff. After a couple of false starts (reading a few pages of things that I could find, but wasn't really interested in reading) I went to the library and picked out a book--Jerusalem by Alan Moore, of graphic novel fame--and its got, like 2000 pages or something. Its new so its in the 14 day book group, which means that you can only take it for 2 weeks, and then you have to renew it, which I did (once) then gave up. Its not often that I do, give up on a book that is. I felt like this one had something to say it just took... so... long... to... say it. I just couldn't get that book rolling. I've had slow starts in books before. You know, it takes 50 or a hundred pages for the author to lay out the premise and get you up to speed sometimes.

200+ pages in, in a month! and I'm still reading completely disjointed tales from the POV of a bunch of, as of yet, unrelated characters from Northampton or "The Boroughs" (Moore's hometown) and I'm not getting it. I've had this book twice as long as I'm supposed to have had it and I don't even know what its about. Might have been good, I think it could have been. A little purple however. Moore seems to suffer from trying to paint as colorful a backdrop as he can in a graphic novel with words. If each frame in a graphic novel is indeed worth a thousand words, then it appears that is about where he was headed.

This ends up being a partial review of Jerusalem as well, I guess.


* None of Ruiz's books show up here, so if I read some of his stuff, it was before 2009, when I started writing this stuff down. And that's why I started thing, so I could keep track of what I've read, and not buy the same book 3 times.