Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s novel has won a clutch of literary prizes in Spain. Its sales, when it came out in 2001, were greeted in the country’s broadsheets as ‘a publishing phenomenon’. What is even more remarkable is its reception in Germany. No less a notable than foreign minister Joschka Fischer has declared, ‘You’ll drop everything and read the whole right through.’ This reflects the fact that German writers have long enjoyed a special relationship with Spanish literature.
To its first English readers, the fantastic adventures of Don Quixote were the creation of Cervantes’ comic genius. Three hundred years later German Romantics turned the don into the hero of a spiritual battle against bourgeois materialism. They have a lot to answer for. A taste for what may be called fantasies with moral — even political — messages has become one of the stocks in trade of Spanish novelists.
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