62 pages • 2 hours read
Carlos Ruiz ZafónThe Shadow of the Wind
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Parts 8-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 8 Summary: "Postmortem (November 27, 1955)"
Daniel’s heart stops for 64 seconds. He wakes up eight days after being shot surrounded by his loved ones: his father, Fermín, and Bea. All of Daniel’s friends, including Tomás Aguilar, come to visit him. He drifts off to sleep.
He wakes up to find Julián Carax in his room. Julián helps Daniel take a sip of water. Julián says farewell, and Daniel reads in his eyes that Julián never discovered that Penélope was his half-sister. Daniel asks Julián to take his pen back and to write with it.
When Daniel awakes again, Bea is there. Daniel asks where Carax is. Puzzled, Bea and the nurse say that no one came in or out of his room in the last six hours. When Daniel turns his head, the pen case is lying there empty.
Part 9 Summary: "The Waters of March (1956)"
Daniel and Bea marry in March. On the eve of his wedding, Fermín and Daniel keep their promise to the geriatric man in the hospice, who led them to Jacinta Coronado. Fermín purchases the favors of a prostitute, and they take her to the hospice, where she makes an old man extremely happy. When they ask to see Jacinta Coronado, they are told that she died two weeks before, after being visited by a mysterious man named Julián, who brought her news of her daughter, Penélope. She died at dawn the next morning, in her sleep.
Of his wedding, Daniel only recalls the touch of Bea’s lips and the vow he would always remember.
Part 10 Summary: "Dramatis Personae (1966)"
Daniel takes up the narrative again, at the counter of the bookstore, as he watches his son, Julián, who will be ten years old tomorrow. He summarizes all of the fates of the main characters. His father lives upstairs in the apartment over the bookstore, while Bea and Daniel run the bookstore now. It offers them a modest living, but they are happy and content. Fermín took over the caretaking of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books when Isaac Montfort died, and he is happily married to Bernarda. Don Barceló sold all of his book stock to Daniel and Bea and quit the book business, out of disgust with the book trade. However, before quitting, he published a volume containing the first three of Julián Carax’s novels.
The last page of the novel repeats the beginning of the novel, with Daniel taking his ten-year-old son to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.
Parts 8-10 Analysis
At the end of the novel, the reader discovers that Daniel is not only the primary narrator and protagonist of the novel but also he hints that he is the writer of the novel the reader is just finishing.
Daniel and Bea’s love story has a different ending because Daniel is willing to confront Bea’s family and to gain their acceptance of him. In addition, Daniel’s personality contains an innocence and loving quality that Julián’s does not. This difference is essential in the positive consequences of Daniel’s love for Bea. Julián, who Nuria asserts was only alive in his books, had an obsessive love for Penélope that was tainted by Julián’s own desire for secrecy and his natural tendency to escape from reality.
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By Carlos Ruiz Zafón
