Coming to Barcelona in the
early 1940s to attend
university, the eighteen year
old Andrea stays with her family: a grandmother, an aunt, two uncles, one with a
wife and infant, and a maid. Clinging to middle-class respectability despite
their poverty, taking sometimes desperate measures to preserve appearances,
theirs is an enclosed world in which personal antagonisms and long-held
resentments fester.
At university Andrea befriends the vivacious Ena, whose life seems a world
apart from the claustrophobic family apartment, and joins a group of would-be
avant-garde students. But then Ena becomes involved with her family, with
disastrous results.
Written when Carmen Laforet was herself in her early twenties, and published
in 1944, Nada is a direct and intimate account of a
young woman encountering the wider world. It is set against the backdrop of a society
traumatised by the Civil War, in a Barcelona whose streets retain an air of
danger, and the family''''s situation and story are bleak, but Andrea''''s youthful
hope and core
humanity remain unscathed. Nada is a an engaging
novel,
and ultimately a positive one.