"Nada" recounts, in coolly understated first-person prose, the experiences of Andrea, an 18-year-old orphan from the provinces who arrives in Barcelona to stay with her dead mother's relatives while she attends university. It has now been reissued in a new translation by Edith Grossman, and more than 60 years later the book's odd charm is undiminished. It was originally published in 1945, when its author was 23, and it created a sensation in Barcelona. The idea that there might be a lone woman in what seems the unrelievedly male pantheon of Spanish novelists of the post-Civil War era - an era which to outsiders, as Mario Vargas Llosa writes in his introduction to "Nada," seems to reek of "fustiness, sacristy and Francoism" - was like discovering an extra story built in a house you thought you knew. I have to admit that, until a month ago, I had never heard of Carmen Laforet. $22.95, The Modern Library £16.99, Harvill Secker.
With crystalline insight into the human condition, Carmen Laforet’s classic novel stands poised to reclaim its place as one of the great novels of twentieth-century Europe.Nada By Carmen Laforet. And Mario Vargas Llosa’s Introduction illuminates Laforet’s brilliant depiction of life during the early days of the Franco regime.
The incomparable Edith Grossman’s vital new translation captures the feverish energy of Laforet’s magnificent story, showcasing its dark, powerful imagery, and its subtle humor. From existential crisis to a growing maturity and resolve, Andrea’s passionate inner journey leaves her wiser, stronger, and filled with hope for the future.
As experience overtakes innocence, Andrea gradually learns the disquieting truth about the people she shares her life with: her overbearing and superstitious aunt Angustias her nihilistic yet artistically gifted uncle Román and his violent brother Juan and Juan’s disturbingly beautiful wife, Gloria, who secretly supports the clan with her gambling. Residing amid genteel poverty in a mysterious house on Calle de Aribau, young Andrea falls in with a wealthy band of schoolmates who provide a rich counterpoint to the squalor of her home life. Loosely based on the author’s own life, it is the story of an orphaned young woman who leaves her small town to attend university in war-ravaged Barcelona. Carmen Laforet’s Nada ranks among the most important literary works of post-Civil War Spain.
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