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The Prisoner of Heaven
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The Prisoner of Heaven (originally El prisionero del cielo) is a 2011 novel by late Spanish author Carlos Ruiz Zafón.After the events of The Shadow of the Wind, Daniel Sempere has settled into married life with Bea Aguilar and their son Julián is about to turn one. One bad day, however, a mysterious old man named Sebastián Salgado comes to leave Fermín a note from their past together in a fancy edition of The Count of Monte Cristo. In the inevitable flashbacks, Fermín reveals what really transpired in all those years he was a prisoner of the Francoist order: his stay in the Montjuic Castle prison, his relationship with Salgado and the schizophrenic novelist David Martín, and his true relationship with the Sempere family. Daniel also discovers a nasty secret involving the mysterious former Minister of Culture Mauricio Valls and the death of his own mother.The novel, part of the tetralogy The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, is basically a large, rewritten flashback to Fermín's past, both expanding on and heavily retconning what we learned in The Shadow of the Wind, all inside the context of a frame narrative that's only partially wrapped up, ending the book on a clifhanger to be resolved in the next book of the series, breaking Zafón's tradition of writing books that could be read as self-contained stories. It was followed by The Labyrinth of Spirits. | |
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All There in the Manual | |
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All There in the Manual: Although the introduction claims that the reader doesn't have to have read the other books in the series to understand it, little about Fermin's relationship with Martin makes sense unless you've read The Angel's Game. Little exposition is given to Daniel and Bea Sempere, either, giving readers little to hold onto about either character unless they're already invested in them from having read Shadow of the Wind. | |
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Cliffhanger Copout | |
| The Prisoner of Heaven / int_4dec4b64 | comment |
Cliffhanger Copout: Despite the introduction's claim that the book can be read as a standalone story, none of the plots are resolved, and the book literally ends with Daniel telling the reader "it had only just begun." Notably, we never learn Martin's fate, who stole Salgado's money, why Valls disappeared in '56, or what the original plan was involving luring Daniel to the hotel. The scene actually turns out to be a flash-forward to a scene that takes place about 3/4 of the way through the next book. | |
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| The Prisoner of Heaven / int_53c5f30e | type |
Happy Ending Override | |
| The Prisoner of Heaven / int_53c5f30e | comment |
Happy Ending Override: A few- At the end of The Angel's Game, Martín was shown to be living alive and well in exile after the Civil War, having gained some peace for himself, if not still occasionally hounded by Corelli. Now it turns out none of this happened: he foolishly returned to Spain in midst of the war and was captured and jailed, with the previous conclusion having happened only on his head. Much of The Shadow of the Wind is about Daniel learning to accept his mother's death in an epidemic when he was still a child and move on. Here, he learns that she was in fact murdered, and now has to juggle his father and Fermin's wishes of letting go of his animosity for Valls and seeking revenge. | |
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| The Prisoner of Heaven / int_53c9fc92 | type |
Flashback | |
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Flashback: About 1/2 of the book is an extended flashback to Fermin's life prior to the events of The Shadow of the Wind. | |
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Broad Strokes | |
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Broad Strokes: Fermín's background as given in his crying confession in The Shadow of the Wind is vaguely similar to the one shown in this book in that it involves him being a spy and spending some time in prison, but otherwise it's drastically rewritten. | |
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Four Eyes, Zero Soul | |
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Four Eyes, Zero Soul: One of Valls' defining features are his wire-rimmed glasses. He also resorts to gruesome torture (including dismemberment) to get information out of political prisoners, isn't above having them summarily executed, extorts a mentally ill man into ghost writing books for him to improve his own literary status, and murders a married woman for spurning his advances. | |
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Flash Forward | |
| The Prisoner of Heaven / int_8abdf73a | comment |
Flashforward: It turns out the cliffhanger epilogue is actually a flash-forward to a scene that takes place 3/4 through the next book. | |
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| The Prisoner of Heaven / int_8f732211 | type |
External Retcon | |
| The Prisoner of Heaven / int_8f732211 | comment |
External Retcon: It is revealed here that the entirety of The Angel's Game was just a story written by the insane Martín, with its ending being pure delusion. Instead, Martín was captured in Spain several years earlier and sent to prison. | |
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| The Prisoner of Heaven / int_930a6407 | type |
Rewrite | |
| The Prisoner of Heaven / int_930a6407 | comment |
Rewrite: Tons from the previous two books. Fermin's past is revisited, but now it is almost completely different from the one he confessed in The Shadow of the Wind. We learn that "The Angel's Game" is in fact a bizarro autobiography written by David Martin rather than the objective truth, and that several events in that book may or may not have happened, or happened under radically different circumstances We also learn that Daniel's mother was actually murdered and didn't die in an epidemic, and that both Fermin and Daniel's father know and have been hiding it from him all these years | |
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Whole Episode Flashback | |
| The Prisoner of Heaven / int_9d6e002e | comment |
Whole Episode Flashback: Almost. It initially seems the book will be entirely about Fermin's past: the first seventy pages are narrated by Daniel before we segue into a 150-page flashback that takes up about half the book. The story then abruptly shifts back to Daniel for a 120-page wrap up. | |
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Writers Cannot Do Math | |
| The Prisoner of Heaven / int_da1c8191 | comment |
Writers Cannot Do Math: In addition to changing details of Fermin's past, Zafon is radically inconsistent with ages and dates. At one point, it's mentioned that Daniel started dating Bea when he was 16, but in the previous book he's explicitly stated to be eighteen. This is further inconsistent with the fact that Daniel is in his 20s in this book, but he got Bea pregnant only weeks into their relationship and they got married right away. On top of this, the pair are stated to have been married for almost two years at the start of the book, but their son is only a few months old, which is further inconsistent with the dates of her pregnancy and subsequent wedding. | |
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Continuity Drift | |
| The Prisoner of Heaven / int_de86b894 | comment |
Continuity Drift: Fermín's background and role in the series is completely rewritten from the version he gave while tearfully opening up to Daniel in The Shadow of the Wind. Instead of spending only some days in Montjuic Castle being tortured by Fumero as told in Shadow, he comes to the castle with the torture already on his back (Stealth Pun here) and spends a much longer time there. He also escapes with the aid of David Martín, instead of being abandoned half dead by his torturers, and the person that heals and hides him is a wealthy Gypsy, not a widow. Finally, instead of being forced into poverty and encountering fortuitously the Sempere family, he goes to live with Brians precisely in order to watch over the Sempere family before becoming voluntarily homeless. | |
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Canon Immigrant | |
| The Prisoner of Heaven / int_fc7c4f92 | comment |
Canon Immigrant: The quote that was the Arc Words of Zafón's star young adult novel, Marina, is now used again: "sometimes we only remember what never happened". Amusingly enough, it is now said to be a quote from a Julián Carax novel. | |
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The Prisoner of Heaven |
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