Just as I noticed in Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, Zafon seems to give in to that writer’s devil that tempts him to explain:
I began my story with that distant dawn when I awoke and could not remember my mother’s face, and I didn’t stop until I paused to recall the world of shadows I had sensed that very morning in the home of Nuria Montfort. Bea listened quietly, making no judgment, drawing no conclusions. I told her about my first visit to the Cemetary of Forgotten Books and about the night I spent reading The Shadow of the Wind. I told her about my meeting with the faceless man and about the letter signed by Penelope Aldaya that I always carried with me without knowing why. I spoke about how I had never kissed Clara Barcelo, or anyone, and of how my hands trembled when I felt the touch of Nuria Montfort’s lips on my skin, only a few hours before. I told her how, until that moment, I had not understood that this was a story about lonely people, about absence and loss, and that that was why I had taken refuge in it until it became confused with my own life, like someone who has escaped into the pages of a novel because those whom he needs to love seem nothing more than ghosts inhabiting the mind of a stranger. (p. 147)
At this point, I felt well gee, why did I bother reading the first 146 pages if it was all going to be synopsized here? Was Zafon afraid that I wasn’t going to "get it?" That perhaps I fell asleep or got too busy for a couple days and needed to be caught up on the reading?
There’s another problem here; in a first person pov, the sentence, "Bea listened quietly, making no judgment, drawing no conclusions." is a hop into a minor character’s head that really should have ended right after the word quietly as that would have indicated no verbal judgment. The rest is an assumption, as the narrator could not know what was going on in Bea’s head. Minor error, but I’m becoming very aware of these slip-ups (and likely becoming a real PITA about it).
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology