La catedral del mar by Ildefonso Falcones

It’s taken me a little longer than I anticipated to get around to it, but now that I have, how did Catedral measure up to its illustrious predecessor? I read the Spanish edition, but the novel is also available in an English translation by Nick Caistor, as The Cathedral of the Sea (2009).Īs we can tell by the fulsome quote from Qué Leer on the back cover of my edition, which proclaims that “Barcelona ya tiene su Los pilares de la Tierra” (Now Barcelona has its Pillars of the Earth), the novel has been heavily marketed for its resemblance to this 1989 doorstopper by Ken Follett, Spain’s most consistently popular author of the last decade. As the eagle-eyed (and elephant-memoried) among you will remember, back in the autumn of 2010 I set to reading Pillars of the Earth itself (all 1076 pages of it), partly as preparation for getting down to La catedral del mar. La Catedral del mar, a first novel by the Catalan lawyer Ildefonso Falcones, was published back in 2006 and made its first appearance on this blog’s TBR list back in October 2010 (I know, I know…).

What this means, of course, is that the busy reader looks at the row of recently-acquired brick-sized bestsellers on the TBR shelf, gulps, sighs, turns around, and picks up the beloved Kindle again, swearing to get some wrist weights and build up those biceps ready to take on the super-tomes at some unspecified time in the future.īut, last week I went on a Proper Holiday (to Lanzarote, since you ask, and very sunny and cultural it was too) and so, knowing that my primary objectives for the week were 1) swimming, 2) reading, 3) eating fish, 4) swimming, and 5) reading, I thought, why not?, and popped one of the TBR shelf’s most senior residents into my suitcase. But the problem with bestsellers is that they tend to be really, really long and, as l ast spring’s reading marathon showed, they seem to be getting longer all the time. In fact, I have a whole blog category about them. So as you know, I’m interested in bestsellers, especially (but not only) in their Spanish incarnation.

La catedral del mar by Ildefonso Falcones