Some time ago, when I reviewed Michel Laub’s Diary of the Fall, I mentioned how sometimes all the ingredients can be there but the recipe is still a failure. Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind is somewhat similar, I’m afraid. All the ingredients are there, yes. It kinda works, and yet it doesn’t.
To be fair, I think Zafón’s novel works comparatively better. That is, one can still read it and somewhat enjoy it. However, The Shadow of the Wind aspires to be a Gothic tale. And to this Gothic fiction specialist, it comes off as a failed attempt.
There is a sustained attempt to present The Shadow of the Wind as a Gothic tale, taking advantage of the settings. But although all the checkboxes are ticked, something is amiss.(more…)
Note: the following article on immortality in Dracula is a modified excerpt (pp. 64-67) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, see here.
Immortality in Dracula acquires ominous tints. The curse is not only construed as the inability to find peace, but also as the pressing need to attack others for nutrition. The suggestion of a possible reversal of the ageing process appears for the first time in Dracula’s castle, when Jonathan Harker sees the Count in his box “but looking as if his youth had been half renewed” (D 59).
When Jonathan relives the experience on English soil later on, the Count has “grown young” (D 184) – an oxymoron of sorts, as it includes two meanings with conflicting arrows of time.
Immortality in Dracula is a matter of understanding precisely what “not to die” entails(more…)
Personally, I like to focus on the aspect of ambiguity and in-betweenness. In this, I draw from Tzvetan Todorov’s definition of the fantastic, as I will explain below.
Examining the differences between the ways Todorov and J.R.R. Tolkien define the fantastic is a fruitful task, as it allows us to pinpoint the ontology of the various expressions of the fantastic. Furthermore, it provides a great theoretical framework for researching more general aspects of otherness.
