I really liked this book! The descriptions are intricate and playful, and it's a sort of bookish Borgesian mystery that I love. I've recently done some reading about the Spanish Civil War so I'm familiar with the context in a way that I wouldn't have been a few months ago, which is always satisfying. There are some really colorful characters in this book. I'm especially a fan of Tomás and Fermín. I hope that we get a female character with as much depth and humor, because so far the female characters are treated kind of antagonistically, or at least they are held at a distance, other than the idealized dead mother. And maybe that makes sense, given the character is 16 at this point and had a bad experience resulting from his desire for Clara, but I think the book would be even richer if we got a female character or two who were fully realized.
Though there are lots of moving parts and I'm having a bit of a hard time keeping track of everything because I'm still fairly sick. We have Carax, the creepy faceless guy burning all his book, Isaac's daughter Nuria who had an affair with Julian, and Penelope who was also in love with him before he left for Paris. And then in Daniel's timeline we have him, his father, Fermin, Tomas, Bea, Clara, her uncle and the music instructor, and now the inspector who seems to be after Fermin.
I love the gothic tone of the book and the gradual unfolding of the mystery, but there is also a bit of a tone of misogyny that I don't love. Women are definitely treated as some unknowable other, they're not really treated like fully realized people.