Carlos is a very modest looking and unassuming Man.He gives an air of comely grace mixed with an effervescent manner.A casual easy-going insouciance is shown with his arrival wearing the same rugby style top in the picture attached.
His attitude is to be a teamplayer with the interviewee , giving full anecdotal answers , though never crossing the point of surfeit.He is an Excellent English speaker as well as Spains biggest selling author since Cervantes.
He declares himself a storyteller , in as much as storytelling is a craft, a craft which Carlos determined to master from a very early age.Execution of a marvelous story is the goal , substance is most desired , but a well executed story with limited substance is what matters in the end,If it is told well, it is a good story.
His Father had a very eclectic taste in Books ranging from Penny Dreadfuls;Gothic Thrillers and the works of Steinbeck , sitting cheek to jowl with Harold Robbins.From that grounding Carlos learned the craft which has led to his recent big sellers and also an early appreciation there should be no snobbery in Stories/Books.
He paid his dues in the field of writing with jobs scribbling advertising material , which helped him sharpen the need to capture the reader early on , screenwriting , which he enjoyed a lot more and then established popularity as a writer of older schoolchildrens Books.Being a professional craftsman he stock to the only rope available in a world in which fellow writers would find a degree of success only to be wiped away like a short-lived pitiful patina on the shores of an unforgiving industry.Eventually he managed to elevate his readership and fame with the hugely popular and critically acclaimed Shadow of The Wind.
The very strengths which made Shadow a universal best seller , imagination; innovation ; re-packaging an older classical genre and a slow fuse thriller are being used for what will be a Four Part Quadrilogy from " four differing entry points" , this , according to Carlos , makes the second part The Angel' Game a prequel and sequel at one and the same time.There are concerns the strong points of Shadow can become the very weaknesses in the rest of the coming parts , yielding to lack of imagination ; repetitiveness and a parody of an old genre. .Heres hoping he can pull it off.
To his credit Zafon is adamant that he will never allow the Shadow Books every be made into Films, " over my dead body " he says.
To exemplify his down to earth humble approach , as we were leaving Charlotte Square , we saw Zafon sitting at an outside Restaurant sipping a Pint.
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