Marina is a gothic novel written by Carlos Ruiz Zafón and published for the first time in 1999.
This book tells
about Oscar Drai and his adventure. At the beginning, Oscar recalls one of his
memories, something happened to him fifteen years before, which he has
pretended to forget.
“I didn’t realise then that sooner or later the ocean of time brings back the memories we submerge in it”
Oscar narrates
that he was a boy who attended a melancholic boarding school in Barcelona, but
he used to go out secretly to take a walk. During one of his escapes, he heard
a wonderful feminine voice singing. Charmed by that voice, he followed the
sound and he arrived in front of a house. Oscar decided to go inside and he
discovered that the voice came from a gramophone. Meanwhile, he saw a pocket
watch on a table and he took it to have a closer look. However, Oscar noticed a
man who was watching him. Therefore, he ran away, but, without realising it, he
took the pocket watch with himself. Some days later, Oscar returned to the
house to give the stolen object back. On this occasion, he met Marina, whom he
would fall in love with, and her father, German, the same man Oscar had seen
the first time.
Marina decided
to share a mystery, which she had secretly witnessed. Therefore, she took Oscar
to Serrià cemetery and she told him that on the last Sunday of each month, a
woman in black used to visit an anonymous grave with a black butterfly engraved.
Out of curiosity Oscar and Marina wanted to discover who this woman was and why
she enacted this ritualistic visitation every month.
The story,
which they would find out, has as protagonists Kolvenik, a man who created
automatons, and a creepy photograph album. The man had lost his humanity, while
his automatons seemed to come alive. Oscar discovered an incredible and surreal
story and, for this reason, he straggled to believe it
“<Sometimes,
the things that are the most real only happen in one's imagination, Oscar> she said. <We only remember what never really
happened>.”
Marina told about the fears that each man feels in the face
of death. Indeed, Kolvenik did everything to make the human body immortal and
perfect, even at risk of losing his humanity. For this reason, he studied every
“freaks of nature” to find a way to heal them. Kolvenik wanted to find a way to
trick Death and he wanted to make non-perishable the human body.
“Our body begins to destroy itself from the moment it is born. We are
fragile. We’re creatures of passage. All
that is left of us are our actions, the good or the evil we do to our fellow
humans”
“That is what nature does with its children. There is no evil in men’s
heart, just a simple struggle to survive the inevitable. The only devil is
Mother Nature… My work, all my efforts, are just an attempt to outdo the great
sacrilege of creation”
Oscar and
Marina discovered a dangerous and macabre secret, which showed them the darkest
side of the human soul.
“We all have a secret buried under lock and key in the attic of our
soul”
Zafón wants
to show us how man responds to the fear of the possible loss of a person
important to him. This fear had encouraged Kolvenik to do what he had done and nearly
pushed Oscar to commit the same mistake
as Kolvenik.
Moreover, in
this novel there are many references to the book of Frankenstein and its author, Mary Shelley. For example, the
creatures who Kolvenik makes are similar to Frankenstein’s monster and Mary
Shelley is a character in Marina. In
addition, the scene where Kolvenik extracts the heart from the chest of his
dead father probably refers to the fact that Mary Shelley kept her husband’s
heart after his death.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Carlos Ruiz
Zafón was born on 25th September 1964 in Barcelona.
After he had
studied in Jesuit boarding school, he begun working within the scope of the
publicity. Moreover, he wrote for La
Vanguardia and El País, two Spanish
newspapers.
In 1993,
after he had divorced his wife, Zafón moved to Los Angeles, where he worked as
screenwriter for Hollywood.
In the same
year, Zafón published his first work, The
Prince of Mist, the first book of The
Mist Trilogy.
In 1999, Zafón
wrote Marina. He considered it as the
best book he had ever written. Indeed, he said “as the writing advanced, everything in the story began to acquire a
shade of farewell, and by time I'd finished it, I sensed that something inside
me, something that even today I cannot explain, but that I still miss every
single day, was forever left among its pages”.
Then, in
2001, Zafón published his most famous novel The
Shadow of the Wind, followed by Angel’s
game, The Prisoner of Heaven and The Labyrinth of Spirits. These books
assemble the tetralogy of The Cemetery of
Forgotten Books.
Thanks to The Shadow of the Wind, Zafón received
many international awards and he became the most-known Spanish writer after
Cervantes.
On 19th June
2020, he died because of colon cancer, which he had been fighting against since
2018.
Moreover, in
2021, the last Zafón’s work, The city of
steam, was published posthumous.
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