The Angel’s Game, Part II

  

 

 

 The Angel’s Game **** by Carlos Ruis Zafon 

 

 

 

 

 

I have more photos than would load easily in one post, so this Edible Review has two parts. If  you can found yourself here without seeing part one of this review, look here.

 

 

 

From my Williams- Sonoma Barcelona Cookbook:

 

 

 

 Pa amb Tomàquet

Tomato-Rubbed Bread

 

This was something we had before each meal in Barcelona, and was part ceremony as well as tradition. No recipe required~ toast your bread, rub the toast with a garlic clove, no need to peel the clove. Take a tomato cut in half and generously rub across the surface of the garlic toast. Drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with salt & enjoy!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Coco de Recapte

Flatbread with Eggplant, Peppers, and Olives

 

 

 

 

 I’m guilty of adding a thin layer of Boursin Cheese on the crust, before adding the veggies, even though the recipe didn’t call for it. I also added some carmelized onions since I had them to add to the pepper & eggplant mixture :-)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

“Pedro always says that the only way you can truly get to know an author is through the trail of ink he leaves behind him. The person you think you see is only an empty character:  truth is always hidden in fiction.”

 

 

  

  

“Everything is a tale, Martin. What we believe, what we know, what we remember, even what we dream. Everything is a story, a narrative, a sequence of events with characters communicating an emotional content. We only accept as true what can be narrated.”

 

 

 

 

“The images and the light that began to appear between sentences took me back to the old, shadowy Barcelona that had shaped us both. I wrote until the sun had set and there was not a drop of coffee left in the flask, until the frozen lake was lit up by a blue moon and my eyes and hands were aching.”

 

 

 

 

  

“The windows were wide open, but Barcelona no longer wanted to tell me anything; I was unable to finish a single page. Anything I did manage to conjure up seemed banal and empty. It was enough to reread my words to understand that they were barely worth the ink with which they’d been typed. I was no longer able to hear the music that issues from a decent piece of prose.”

 

 

 

 

“That man in black is the master of this place, the father of all secret and forbidden knowledge, or wisdom and memory, the bringer of light to storytellers and writers since time immemorial. He is our guardian angel, the angel of lies and of the night.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I recognized the wax seal with the angel even in the tenuous light that dripped from the streetlamp above our heads.”

 

 

 

 

 

“I cursed the moment I had decided to open that door and went outside to the street hoping to forget, if only for a few hours, the darkness that throbbed at the heart of the tower house.”

 

 

 

 

“The tower on the docks of Barcelona port rose before us like a cupola of steel with great metal threads wrenched from a mechanical cathedral.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“One of the peculiarities of Barcelo’s bookshop was that books were spoken of as if they were exquisite wines, cataloged by bouquet, aroma, consistency, and vintage.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I had always felt that the pages I left behind were a part of me. Normal people bring children into the world; we novelists bring books. We are condemned to put our whole lives into them, even though they hardly ever thank us for it. We are condemned to die in their pages and sometimes even to let our books be the ones, who in the end, will take our lives.” 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Senor Sempere believed that God lives, to a smaller or greater extent, in books, and that is why he devoted his life to sharing them, to protecting them, and to making sure their pages, like our memories and our desires, are never lost. He believed, and he made me believe too, that as long as there is one person left in the world who is capable of reading them and experiencing them, a small piece of God, or of life, will remain.”

 

 

 

 

“Every book, every volume you see, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and the soul of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader’s hands, a new spirit. . .”

 

 

 

“The Angel’s Game is a book for story lovers: expansive, rich and slow to digest.”  

~Robin Vidimos for The Denver Post.

 

 

 

 

Be sure to visit Food for Thought to see what everyone is reading & eating!