Marina - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
'Fifteen years on, the remembrance of that day has returned to me. I have
seen that boy wandering through the mist of the railway station, and the
name of Marina has flared up again like a fresh wound. We all have a secret
buried under lock and key in the attic of our soul. This is mine...'
In May 1980, 15-year-old Oscar Drai suddenly vanishes from his boarding
school in the old quarter of Barcelona. For 7 days and nights no one
knows his whereabouts...
His story begins in the heart of old Barcelona, when he meets Marina and
her father German Blau, a portrait painter. Marina takes Oscar to a cemetery
to watch a macabre ritual that occurs on the fourth Sunday of each month.
At 10 a.m. precisely a coach pulled by black horses appears. From it descends
a woman dressed in black, her face shrouded, wearing gloves, holding a single rose.
She walks over to a gravestone that bears no name, only the mysterious emblem of
a black butterfly with open wings.
When Oscar and Marina decide to follow her they begin a journey that will take
them to the heights of a forgotten, post-war Barcelona, a world of aristocrats
and actresses, inventors and tycoons; and a dark secret that lies waiting in the
mysterious labyrinth beneath the city streets.
“We are doomed to remember what never really happened”
“Although I could hear the echo of my footsteps, I could have sworn I was walking
a few centimeters above the ground”
“Patience is the mother of all virtues and the godmother of madness”
“Time does to the body what stupidity does to the soul”
“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”
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