Nuria

Nuria is Isaac’s daughter, a secretary at Cabestany’s publishing house, and the person whose independent intervention saves copies of Julian Carax’s novels from destruction. Her friendship with Carax and her decision to conceal his books in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books preserve the one copy that later reaches Daniel Sempere, making her quiet work central to the novel’s chain of discovery.

Identity and Background

Nuria worked as Cabestany’s secretary and corresponded with Carax. Isaac describes her as someone drawn to lost causes: as a child she took in small animals found in the street, and later she extended the same impulse to neglected writers. Her father suggests that this sympathy may have been connected to his own unfulfilled ambition to become a writer. He also describes her as compelling to men, though his judgments about her private life are colored by his protectiveness and suspicion.

Nuria’s relationship with Isaac is not straightforwardly intimate. He knows details of her life through Cabestany and other sources, while she gives him an account of her Paris visit that differs from what Cabestany told him. Isaac recognizes that he may be among the last people she would confide in precisely because he is her father.

Connection to Carax

In 1932 or 1933, Nuria travelled to Paris on business for Cabestany and stayed for a couple of weeks in Carax’s apartment, according to what Cabestany told Isaac. Nuria told her father that she had stayed in a hotel. Isaac suspected that Carax was attracted to her, but the evidence does not establish that they were lovers. His suspicion is presented as a father’s interpretation, not as a confirmed account of their relationship.

The connection mattered beyond that visit. Nuria had corresponded with Carax, and she was among the very few people in Barcelona who had read his novels. She remained in contact with him until he sent the final corrections for his last book; after that, she heard nothing from him for months. Isaac believed that she might still have been in love with Carax, but he acknowledged that he could not know for certain.

Saving the Novels

After someone offered Cabestany’s son three times the market value for the remaining stock of Carax’s novels, the son tried to demand still more. The prospective buyer withdrew his offer, and shortly after midnight, Cabestany’s warehouse in Pueblo Nuevo burned down. Nearly all of Carax’s books were lost.

Before the fire, Nuria had a premonition about the proposed purchase. Acting on her own initiative, she went to the warehouse and took one copy of each Carax title. Her rescue of the books was therefore not an official publishing-house measure but a personal act by the secretary who had corresponded with their author and read his work. Once the warehouse burned, those saved copies became exceptionally important.

Nuria later went to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books because she feared that the man called Coubert was following her and wanted the books in order to destroy them. She hid the volumes among the maze of shelves without telling Isaac where she had placed them. She said that she would return for them once she found Carax, and left them there to gather dust when that reunion did not occur. One of those concealed books was the copy Daniel found and adopted.

Secrecy and Legacy

Nuria’s concealment shaped the mystery that Daniel investigates. Isaac does not know exactly where she hid the books, and he cannot say whether she was truthful about her Paris stay or her feelings for Carax. Her silence leaves gaps in the account, but her actions are clear: she removed the books from the warehouse before the fire and placed them beyond the reach of the person seeking to destroy them.

Years later, the survival of a copy of The Shadow of the Wind becomes a story among rare-book collectors. Gustavo Barceló’s discovery of the book attracts offers from London, Paris, and Rome, while the rumours surrounding Carax’s disappearance and the faceless book-burner increase the novels’ market value. In the later account of the books’ recovery, Carax identifies Nuria as the person who hid the surviving copy in a place he could not find. Her preservation work thus carries two consequences: it protects Carax’s writing from near-total erasure, and it brings Daniel into the history that the books contain.

Afterlife of the Books

The novels’ fate does not end with their hiding. After Barceló closes his bookshop, he sells his stock to Sempere and launches a publishing company devoted to reissuing Carax. The first volume, containing three novels recovered from proofs that had ended up in a Cabestany family furniture warehouse, sells 342 copies. The modest sales contrast with the earlier scarcity that made Carax’s books coveted objects, but the reissue confirms that the surviving work has returned to circulation.

Nuria’s role in this history is defined less by public recognition than by the material consequences of her choices. A secretary’s correspondence, a warning she acted upon, and a hidden set of books connect a nearly destroyed body of work to a future reader. Her devotion to lost causes becomes a practical form of literary preservation.