YMMV / Marina (1999)

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • When Eva tells Mijail that she is pregnant, he grins and enters a long week of work to rebuild his body from the disease that was eating it away. Oddly, Eva's sole thought is that Mijail just became even more insane with the revelation and is planning to turn the baby into some similar monstrosity. What if Mijail was actually overjoyed with the news and only wanted to rebuild himself in order to be able to raise his child? He only does what Eva feared after the adult María resurrects him, and we have no context for what happened: maybe she choose to be cyborgized voluntarily, or maybe Mijail's mind now was legitimately warped after spending decades rotting in his grave. Certainly, Óscar himself points out that, unlike what Eva and Luis believe, maybe Kolvenik is not a murderous creature and only wants to live.
  • In line with the previous, why did María resurrect Mijail? Was it because she really inherited Mijail's supposed madness as everybody claims, or was it because her depressing life led her to do it either For Science! or in the search of a better father figure?
• Captain Obvious Reveal: Marina is the one who is ill, not Germán. It is understandable that Óscar might be subconsciously in denial about it, but that the narration tries to play it to the reader too is hard to take seriously.
• Delusion Conclusion: Given the novel's Arc Words, at least some readers back at its heyday interpreted them as an implication that Óscar is an Unreliable Narrator.
• Designated Villain: In Kolvenik's background, he was taken to a madhouse because the cops found him trying to give his recently deceased mentor an experimental if highly advanced artificial heart, which seemingly only made them think he was a maddened desecrator rather than a young medicine genius trying his best. The trend continues, and after Eva sees an older Kolvenik trying to resurrect a woman who had died in an accident, the narration tries to paint this as his Start of Darkness, because such an unholy act cannot be good or come from good intentions at all. This might be justified because both the cops and Eva herself might have been uneducated, deeply religious people who didn't know any better, but their perspective is never contested by the story itself, which seems to treat both the brilliant inventor and the resurrected corpse as the same.
• Escapist Character: Especially targeted to male loner types. Who would not want to explore the mysteries of a city shrouded in darkness and find beautiful girls who become their partners in their solitude?
• Harsher in Hindsight: In the book's preface, Carlos Ruiz Zafón explains he felt his youth was steadily abandoning him back when he wrote the novel (he was 35 at the time). Considering he died at the relatively premature age of 55, those words turned out to be much more accurate than nobody could have predicted.
• It Was His Sled: Nearly everybody who knows this novel knows that Marina dies at the end, or at least that the ending is heart-wrenching.
• Signature Scene: Rather a signature cover, given that it is not a scene in the book itself. The cover given to the book by Booket publishings, a black and white photography of a little girl barefoot and in a white dress entering a gate, is probably as iconic as the book itself.
• Spiritual Adaptation: Given their high number of similarities (presumably casual, as Marina is yet to publish in Japan), Kazuki Sakuraba's 2003-2011 light novel series Gosick could be considered the closest to a Japanese version of Marina.
• Vindicated by History: It might surprise newer readers who know the book as one of Zafón's greatest works, but Marina went relatively unnoticed back when it was published in 1999 (Zafón's breakout was actually The Shadow of the Wind, published two years later), and it only became really popular when it was re-edited in 2007. The author acknowledged this himself in a note in the reedition, blaming Executive Meddling and other troubles for the novel's tortuous history.
• The Woobie: Kolvenik couldn't save any of his loved ones or himself; Óscar lost the new, fulfilling life he had just got, including his beloved; Marina had an uncurable illness all the time and by the end of the book she is dead.

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