The Prince of Mist
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- ISBN13: 9780316044776
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
It’s war time, and the Carver family tree decides to place the capital where they live and go to a tiny coastal village where they’ve recently bought a home. But from the minute they cross the threshold, weird things start to take place. In that mysterious house still lurks the spirit of Jacob, the previous owners’ son, who died by drowning.
With the help of their new friend Roland, Max and Alicia Carver start to explore the weird circumstances of that death and learn the being of a mysterious being called the Prince of Mist–a diabolical character who has returned from the shadows to collect on a debt from the past. Soon the three friends find themselves caught up in an adventure of sunken ships and an enchanted stone garden–an adventure that will change their lives forever.Amazon.com Review
It’s war time, and the Carver family tree decides to place the capital where they live and go to a tiny coastal village where they’ve recently bought a home. But from the minute they cross the threshold, weird things start to take place. In that mysterious house still lurks the spirit of Jacob, the previous owners’ son, who died by drowning.
With the help of their new friend Roland, Max and Alicia Carver start to explore the weird circumstances of that death and learn the being of a mysterious being called the Prince of Mist–a diabolical character who has returned from the shadows to collect on a debt from the past. Soon the three friends find themselves caught up in an adventure of sunken ships and an enchanted stone garden–an adventure that will change their lives forever.
Amazon Exclusive: Interview with Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Leader of The Prince of Mist
How did you come to write The Prince of Mist as your debut novel, which was first published in Spanish in 1993?
When I wrote The Prince of Mist I was in my mid twenties. I had written a couple of unpublished novels and a number of fleeting tales before, published some pieces in magazines and newspapers, etc. I had been writing since I was a child, but I realized that I had never really written anything that I was completely pleased with. Something was missing. I already felt that I was late in the game and that I had been wasting my time doing additional things while I should have been focusing more seriously in my writing. I guess that, like many writers, I was just trying to find my own voice. Around that time I was effective as a musician, although I knew that my “right” path, at least well, was in the writing. At some point I chose to drop everything and start effective on this small novel, telling myself that this had to be “the one.” Although I had never thought I would write for younger readers, the tale seemed to me perfectly suited for that genre and, I suppose, I still hoped to be able to write something that would appeal to readers of all ages. I chose to try to write the book I wanted to read when I was 12 or 13 years ancient. I worked reasonably hard on it, harder than I had worked on anything before. I remember writing at night over the summer of 1992 in Barcelona, from midnight till dawn. It was the summer of the Barcelona Olympics and it was hot and humid as hell. You can say I really sweated this one. I finished up having to buy this portable AC machine that I would point at my face while I was writing. I was fortunate in that the novel won an vital literary award and became reasonably successful. It was the book that allowed me to become a professional writer and to start my career as a novelist, and I’ve permanently been fond of it.
What do you reflect are the most vital differences when writing for adult readers and young adult readers?
I don’t reflect there’re that many differences, really. You just have to write the best possible tale in the most well-organized way you are capable of. It is all about the language, the style, the atmosphere, the characters, the plot, the images and textures… If anything, I judge that younger readers are even more demanding and sincere about their feelings about what they’re reading, and you have to be honest, never condescending. I don’t reflect younger readers are an ounce less smart than adult ones. I reflect they are able to know anything intellectually but perhaps there’re emotional fundamentals that they have not veteran in their lives yet, although they will eventually. Because of this, I reflect it is vital to include a perspective in the work that allows them to find an emotional core that they can tell to not just intellectually. Additional than that, I reflect you should work as hard as you can for your audience, respect them and try to bring the best of your craft to the table. My own personal view is that there’s just excellent writing and terrible writing. All additional marks are, at least to me, beside the point.
In the novel, there are many references to watches, clocks and the passage of time. For instance, Max Carver, the central character, receives a pocket watch as a birthday gift from his watchmaker father. Its case is engraved with the words “Max’s Time Machine.” When the Carver family tree moves to a coastal town and arrives at the train station, Max observes that the train station clock is turning backwards. Why is the theme of time so vital in the novel?
Time is the thread of our lives, and in this tale we see how events in the past, actions in our lives, have consequences later on. In some ways, we are the sum of our actions, our choices, our deeds. Life hands us a number of cards at the beginning of the game. We cannot choose them, but we can choose how we play them. That is an aspect that interests me very much and I try to explore it through the tales I write. I also judge that we are, to a certain extent, what we remember and the novel tries to reflect on these thoughts as it jumps back and into the world in time exploring the mystery at the heart of the novel.
Lacking revealing too many secrets of your craft, what do you feel are the key ingredients of a spellbinding mystery?
I reflect a excellent mystery tale is just a excellent tale, period. The key ingredients are the same as for any kind of excellent tale: language, style, atmosphere, characterization, structure, imagery, subtext, etc. Excellent mysteries tend to be based on character rather than just on plot, but at the end of the day it is all in the writing really.
Max, Alicia and Roland are all teenagers, who are confronted with extraordinary and bewildering situations, and yet they don’t immediately turn to adults for answers. Why not?
Because I reflect that teenagers want their own answers. They need them. They need to know the world around, and inside, themselves and they can only do that by finding out themselves the truth. Children rely on adults to tell them what the world is, and they usually get taken for a ride. A teenager knows, feels, the world is something she or he has to figure out.
The novel’s setting–a coastal town in a time of war—is not very point. Why not?
I guess if you read between the lines you could guess the town is on the south coast of England during World War II. In the original version that was the case, but while I was revising the translation I chose to rewrite and redone certain parts and details and opted for a more generic location. I feel that what is vital is that this is a tale that happens in a place that we all can remember in our lives, and I wanted to emphasize that.
The Prince of Mist was an award winner and a bestseller in Spain, and has only recently reached an English-reading audience. What is the translation process and how were you involved in it?
I am very involved in the translation process. I’ve been very lucky in that I’ve been effective with the extremely talented Lucia Graves on the English translations of my novels. Lucia, who’s a very accomplished novelist on her own, grew up in Spain and is completely bilingual. Our goal is to bring the reader a text that is exactly the same as the original in terms of flow, of texture, of pacing, of the composition the prose makes. To that end we work very hard with Lucia and I regularly I’ll rewrite sections or retouch things here and there to ensure that what you read in English is nearly 100% what you would read in Spanish, lacking losing anything of the rhythm or the nuances in the flow of the language. I’ve noticed that sometimes readers, especially readers in English who are not very used to reading translations, tend to mystify the process and reflect that a translation is a rewrite or a reinvention of the original. It is not. A excellent translation is invisible and bring you exactly what was in the original, nothing more, nothing less.
You apportion your time between Barcelona and LA. Are the two cities reflected in your work?
I reflect so. Barcelona is my hometown, the place I was born and grew up in. It is in my blood and I am very much a product of it. On the additional hand, I’ve spent reasonably some time in California and I judge that a lot of my experiences here find their ways into the books. Writers use what they have at hand to write, what they have inside of them and what they see outside. We write about life, trying to figure it out and, hopefully, come up with something of value and beauty that we can share with the reader along the way.
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when i read the letter from the writer it was touching, that such a book could be as vital to fight for just for us to read it, it was a fantastic book yet w out his letter it wouldn’t have been worth the wait.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
It is wartime. Max’s family tree moves from the city to the seaside where they inhabit a gorgeous but long abandoned house. The moment they arrive, weird things start to occur. There is the sinister cat that meets them at the train station and won’t place them alone. There are the odd whispering noises that only the children can hear. There is a walled garden filled with menacing circus statues and a sunken ship in the bay. It’s not long before Max learns that this was once the home of a child who drowned under mysterious circumstances. With his sister, Alicia, and Roland, a local boy, Max attempts to unravel the mystery at the risk of their own lives.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón is the leader of six novels, including the international bestseller THE SHADOW OF THE WIND, a gothic mystery set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. THE PRINCE OF MIST is his first book, available for the first time in English. Though proposed for younger readers with its tightly all ears scope and simpler language, fans of Zafon’s additional titles will notice a similarity in both theme and tone. Like his previous work, THE PRINCE OF MIST is a gothic novel with supernatural fundamentals in which the secrets of the past threaten the present.
Like most books dealing with spooky material, the scariest part of THE PRINCE OF MIST is at the beginning when no one even knows the cause for the mystery. Sometimes the most frightening things are the simplest: a key turning by itself in the wardrobe door, or a push on the stairs in a house one knows to be empty. The children suspect the house is haunted. Once they hear about the drowning of Jacob Fleischman, they assume they are dealing with a ghost, but the truth ends up being much more complex. As the novel progresses, a monstrous figure referred to as the Prince of Mist emerges. He can make wishes come right, but only on the condition of perfect loyalty. Persons who snub their promise to him pay with their lives. The Prince of Mist goes by many names, including Dr. Cain, and appears in multiple guises. Long believed to have drowned in the wrecked ship in the bay, the Prince of Mist cheats death by paying for it with the lives of others.
Roland’s grandfather, the lighthouse keeper, confronted the specter of Dr. Cain in the last war. When the ship they were traveling on was dashed to pieces on sharp rocks, Champion was the only survivor. Building a lighthouse out of gratitude for having escaped with his life, Champion has kept watch over the town ever since, never sleeping at night when the sweeping ray of the lighthouse is most needed. Champion tells the boys about Dr. Cain: “One time in a million, a name who is still young understands that life is a one-way journey and he decides that the rules of the game don’t agree with him…. As a replacement for of playing with dice or cards, the game consists of playing with life and death, then the shark turns into a name very treacherous, indeed.”
Mixing a supernatural mystery with an idyllic summer on the seashore gives THE PRINCE OF MIST an elegiac tone. The sudden changes of temperature, from hot sand to cold ocean currents, from sunny days to supernatural fogs, give the book a visceral touch one can nearly feel creeping along one’s skin. One of the friends does not survive the summer. One of them has a secret identity. Not even the marvel of first like will be able to protect the children from a past that threatens to overrun them. It’s not just summers that end, Zafón suggests, but childhood, and eventually life itself.
Initially, I was curious as to why Zafón set THE PRINCE OF MIST during wartime. It seemed unnecessary. The war is mentioned a few times throughout the novel, but the tiny coastal village seems immune from news or shortages. But one moment from the beginning of the book caught my attention. The local boy, Roland, says this will be his last summer in town because in September he will be drafted. The evil that reaches for these children’s lives isn’t merely that of the supernatural variety. And if evil is more apparent during times of war, that does not mean it sleeps for non-combatants. These children will be questioned to pay for a crime that occurred long before their lifetime, committing no sin beyond the manufacturing accident of birth. This is as inevitable a part of growing up as anything else they encounter in their glorious and terrifying summer.
THE PRINCE OF MIST is recommended for readers who delight in supernatural mysteries that are never fully clarified. Is Dr. Cain’s symbol — a six-pointed star in a circle — related to the atrocities that take place just across the border? Are the unnatural prices he questions for the wishes he grants and his relentless collection on his debt related to centuries of anti-Semitic folklore? What significance did the ancient reels of amateur home movies abandoned in the garage — which Max screens for clues about his mystery — have at the time in which they were filmed? What are the adults leaving out when the children question questions about their past? These questions and others are never fully answered, building THE PRINCE OF MIST the kind of book that keeps returning to the mind of the reader long after the final page is read. As Max marvels while reading a book about the life and thoughts of Copernicus, “In an infinite universe there are too many things that escaped human understanding.”
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
Based on the description of the book, I was expecting a excellent, ancient-fashioned ghost tale. As a replacement for, the tale contained more fundamentals of magic and fantasy than ghosts and horror. The tale starts when Max Carver and his family tree go from a city in what seems to be England (poss. London) to the coast in order to get away from the war (The book takes place in 1943). Once they reach their new home in a tiny coastal town, weird things start to take place. Clocks run backwards, a weird cat befriends Max’s younger sister, and Max stumbles upon a garden of statues – one of which appears to go.
The novel starts off very slowly setting up the tale but does not get going until after the first 75 pages or so. It is not until Max meets a new friend, Roland, that the tale really starts to take off. It is at this point that the reader starts to get more details about the backstory of the weird happenings in the tiny town. It is only after meeting Champion Kray, Roland’s grandfather, that we find out who the Prince of Mist is.
The tale is very atmospheric and rich in detail. The history of Champion Kray and the Prince of Mist is very well written and does lend an element of spookiness to the tale. Even the budding romance between Roland and Max’s sister Alicia is well developed. CAUTION: some of the descriptions of their interactions lean toward a more mature teenage audience.
The ending is exciting, quick paced, and bittersweet. As this was the leader’s first real novel, I must say that it was very excellent for a first.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
I loved Zafon’s earlier novel “Shadow of the Wind”, and bought this one with high expectations. Sorry to say, it turned out to be a damp squib. The storyline is weak, the writing insipid, and the plot is riddled with innumerable loopholes. The Prince of Mist is a ghost that, for reasons unexplained, chooses to make his appearance when the protagonist’s family tree appears in the town. And a name is murdered (I don’t want to spoil the fun just in case you have made the mistake of purchasing the book) after a lot of (melo)drama when the act could have been accomplished on the fist page. Don’t buy it.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I just finished this in Spanish (I’m an intermediate student) and was glad I could read it with minimal trips to the glossary. It is a fleeting book that pulls you in and carries you along reasonably well, with excellent and likeable charachters, a excellent Faustian villian, and brilliant evocation of place. But not all the pieces fit together well, seemingly vital tale lines were simply dropped (the cat, the enchanted armoire, etc.), and the ending seemed abrupt and gratuitous. Finally, I establish it hard to compose a coherent psychological tale from the material open (why Orpheus exactly, the excellent versus evil framework, why the clock and clockmaker backstory, what does the book have to do with ‘magic’ per se, etc.) So a lot of goofy stuff sticking out all over–kind of like an adolescent with promise. I look forwards to trying another of Zafón’s books.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5