Vendetta told me I needed to read The Shadow of the Wind by Zafón, and as usual, I did as she commanded. I read it, loved it (even though I left it at LAX at the beginning of a 40 hour flight to a destination where I would spend hours of my life in a hammock)... and as her tutelage further commanded, I purchased copies of his next two books. I'm currently at the finish line with Angel's Game and the narrator, David Martín, has just taken a train to a sanitorium in the mountains, where he paid for two nights at a hotel before finding his love, Cristina, who has lost her mind. She goes on a walk out onto the ice on the night he comes to free her and run away with her. He follows her bloody footprints out across the snow and runs on to the ice that is cracking in veins around her feet. All of this, and what comes next; his journey back to Barcelona, finding his boss in an armchair and shooting him in the head, only to realize that he's just shot a dummy; finding a passageway to the basement where he finds more dummies; all of this is suddenly so familiar! Is it transplanted into/from another book verbatim? Has it been made into a movie? HAVE I ALREADY READ THIS BOOK? DAMMIT! !!!
I don't know the answer.
Two nights ago I dreamed that I was on the porch of a grey Victorian house at night drawing a baby. As I was drawing, a great Dane paddled out into the black sea before me that surrounded the house where I sat. He tumbled forward and had only his haunches outside of the water. It was beautiful and I waded out in the water next to him to draw him. The drawing was awkward, and I closed my notebook. I also ducked my head under so that I was upside down, facing the dog. It was so completely peaceful and beautiful underwater until I realized how large a whale would be compared to me if he were to surface and I was suddenly afraid. I tipped myself upright again and opened my notebook. The drawings of the dog and the baby were on pages facing one another and had completed the drawings of one another in confident lines that I would have never thought of using.
This has nothing to do with the book, but I feel that the book has somehow influenced my dream-life, and I want to remember the dream and the book in a connect four kind of way. But with just the two of them connecting. Yesterday I painted an abstract teal and lime backdrop for a YouTube gameshow at Drew the carpenter's house in Encino with Bean the tranny-loving lead painter. Today I went golfing in Palm Springs. Those two facts can be the connect 3 and 4.
Ta-da, Zafón.
