On the City of Mist

Barcelona, 1453. Barcelona, 1569. Barcelona, 1610. Barcelona, 1905. Barcelona, 1936. Barcelona, 1942.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The City of Mist is a book about Barcelona. It’s a set of interlinked short stories that take real historical moments — Cervantes publishing Don Quixote, Gaudí proposing a skyscraper for Manhattan, the city’s bombardment in the civil war — and give them a fantastical, Gothic spin: there are dragons here, ghosts inhabiting the city, and vampires, or something like them. A few touchstones recur across the stories — Gothic angels carved in stone, melancholic women in white, the sheer possibility of a city that never came to be — and there’s an immense sense of loss, bound up, it seems to me, with the death of Barcelona’s revolutionary project. Class matters in many of these stories, and we see the necessity of transforming the city’s structure; but the revolution failed, and all that remains is mist and melancholy.

His Barcelona is decidedly unlike the way the city advertises itself today. Isn’t Barcelona a stunning, sunny, avant-garde place? From our vantage, it is — I love it, and I think it’s the finest city in Spain — and yet Ruiz Zafón insists something has been lost, that this is a city that has suffered, and goes on suffering, under the weight of its immense past. All the stories are excellent, the single best being “The Prince of Parnassus,” his fictionalization of the writing of Don Quixote, and the collection is unusual in that not one story is mediocre; they’re all beautifully written, composed with the magic that runs through the city’s broken cobblestones. They stand on their own and yet are intertwined: the first is about the childhood of a boy named David Martín and his beloved Blanca (the woman in white, if you take the name seriously), the second about a young mother dying as she gives birth — to a son named David Martín. We meet a Raimundo de Sempere who receives the plans for a labyrinthine library from a refugee after the fall of Constantinople, and an Antoni de Sempere who befriends a young Miguel de Cervantes newly arrived from Rome, and the astute reader will catch the family resemblance between the two Semperes. The stories are so deeply intertwined that the real protagonist is best understood as Barcelona itself, which has agency over the people who live in it — an eternal, haunted city, and I only wish I could spend more time reading it through Ruiz Zafón’s mind. May he rest in peace.