Title: Marina Author: Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Published: July 22, 2014
Genre(s): Horror
Page Count: 336
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:In May 1980, fifteen-year-old Oscar Drai suddenly vanishes from his barding school in Barcelona. For seven days and seven nights no one knows his whereabouts...
His story begins in an old quarter of the city, where he meets the strange Marina and her father, Germán Blau, a portrait painter. Marina takes Oscar to a cemetery to watch a macabre ritual that occurs on the last Sunday of each month. At exactly ten o'clock in the morning, a coach pulled by black horses appears. From it descends a woman, her face shrouded be a black velvet cloak. Holding a single rose, she walks to a gravestone that bears no name, only a mysterious emblem of a black butterfly with open wings.
When Oscar and Marina decide to follow her, they begin a journey that transports them to a forgotten, postwar Barcelona--a world of aristocrats and actresses, inventors and tycoons--and reveals a dark secret that lies waiting in the mysterious labyrinth beneath the city streets.
There is something very characteristic of Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s novels; you always know when you’re reading one. Not that they’re all exactly alike—it’s more like this author’s stories have a similar pattern and style. Marina, for instance, instantly reminded me of The Shadow of the Wind, even though it’s been a few years since I read the latter. I suppose there aren’t too many Gothic/literary novels set in Barcelona, written with such elegant prose.
The story in Marina is strictly Gothic: veiled figures, cemetery rendezvous, monsters, orphans, abandoned mansions, unsolved mysteries. Ruiz Zafón weaves all these things together so skillfully, creating a novel that dark and dangerous, yet also haunting. The reader is able to follow Oscar, a young student, as he and his newfound friend, Marina, unearth an intrigue that leads them across Barcelona and across time. The driving figure behind all of this is Mijail Kolvenik, a shadowy figure whose obsession with death took a grisly turn.
I really enjoyed the way this book unfolded—excepting the last 50 pages, which seemed to drag on. Oscar happens upon things quite by accident, and soon he’s in way over his head as he’s found himself in a mysterious cover-up from the 1940’s. It seemed like Oscar’s main duty was to find people who were able to tell the story, as whenever a new character was introduced, Marina spends a chapter or two allowing that secondary character to go back in time and explain their own history. This sort-of info-dumping didn’t bother me much at all, as I thought the author managed to transition very well within those sections. However, it did make Oscar feel sort of superfluous as a character.
Though there was a bit of something having to do with Oscar’s relationship with Marina, most of the book deals with events that happened decades before Oscar, the supposed protagonist, was born. He seemed mostly like a character whose purpose was to observe and relay information, rather than a well-rounded personality in his own right. Of course, the last few chapters of Marina deal solely with Oscar and his personal life, but after the bulk of the text had a very different tone, that ending felt strange and tacked on in a way.
All this is not to say that I didn’t like Marina—I did. But it’s certainly not my favorite book by this author; I think he’s done better work than this for sure. At the same time, Marina is an inventive, thrilling modern Gothic, written by a man who has obviously talent. I think this book is definitely worth looking into.
