Carmen Laforet

RBA (Spain) has just published a biography of Carmen Laforet, "Una mujer en fuga" (A woman on the run).

El “enigma Laforet”. Una mujer en fuga ¿hacia dónde? Anna Caballé e Israel Rolón se preguntan qué le llevó al silencio de Bartleby y la huida perpetua. En 1987, Rolón conoció a la escritora en la universidad de Georgetown. La vio rechazar el atril de la conferencia ex cátedra. Carmen Laforet, 66 años: “Con el pelo gris y abundante manchas oscuras en la piel, sin asomo de maquillaje, y un sencillo conjunto de falda y suéter de punto, también gris…” Le intrigó aquella mujer lacónica, “mostrando una actitud indiferente, y al mismo tiempo agotada, hacia sus propias novelas”. La profesora Caballé, la recuerda en la Menéndez Pelayo, agosto del 82; la misma impresión. Una mujer tímida que habla de su obra con un hilo de voz como si no fuera con ella… El manuscrito de “Nada” y la relación epistolar con Ramón J. Sender (el hombre que la amó sinceramente desde la distancia sin ser correspondido) fueron los primeros documentos de esa “mujer en fuga” que dejó como rastro más de seiscientas cartas que sus biógrafos han estudiado durante una década. Entre sus amistades, la tenista Lilí Álvarez que ejerció sobre ella una influencia religiosa y una ambigüedad sexual que Laforet mantuvo siempre oculta; o la autora de “Celia”, Elena Fortún. “Laforet buscó siempre, a lo largo de su vida, la figura materna que no tuvo”, apunta Caballé.

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Carmen Laforet: Nada

Emma Hagestadt reviews Carmen Laforet's Nada.

Published in Spain in 1945 when she was just 23, Carmen Laforet's prize-winning novel has been in print ever since. 18-year-old Andrea, the novel's hopeful young narrator, arrives in Barcelona to live with her grandmother, uncles and aunts in a "stagnant, rotting" apartment on the Calle de Aribau.

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Spanish Literature

Best books of 2007

The Washington Post's best books of 2007 list includes seven Spanish and Latin American authors.

The Bad Girl, by Mario Vargas Llosa; translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (FSG). Irresistibly entertaining and, like all of its author's work, formidably smart. - Jonathan Yardley

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot DIaz (Riverhead). Oscar clearly is not intended to function as a hero in the classical sense. Geek swagger, baby. Get used to it. - Jabari Asim

Delirium, by Laura Restrepo; translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer (Nan A. Talese). A book-and-a-half: stunning, dense, complex, mind-blowing. The setting is Bogota, Colombia. Far above politics, right up into high art. - Carolyn See

In Her Absence, by Antonio Munoz Molina; translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen (Other). This elegant, precise and inimitable novel focuses intensely on a civil servant and his passionate yet painful relationship with his wife of six years. - Brigitte Weeks

Nada, by Carmen Laforet; translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (Modern Library). After six decades, it has lost none of its power and originality, and we are fortunate to have it in this fine translation. - JY

Dancing to "Almendra", by Mayra Montero; translated by Edith Grossman (FSG). The fictional, gossamer beauty and blood-soaked brutality that personifies Cuba of 1957. - Joanne Omang

Lost City Radio, by Daniel Alarcon (HarperCollins). Readers will recognize fragments of recent history in Argentina, Chile and, most particularly, Peru. A fable for the entire continent. - Jonathan Yardley

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Latin American Literature

Nada by Carmen Laforet

Alberto Manguel reviews Carmen Laforet's Nada.

During my adolescence, in the Buenos Aires of the 60s, my friends and I believed that the only worthy literature in Spanish was written in Latin America, an arrogant opinion that seemed confirmed by the wealth of the writers brought on by the so-called boom, such as Julio Cortazar and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The literature of Spain, smothered by the civil war, appeared to have survived only in its poetry, and not at all in its fiction. Then, one day, we discovered Nada by Carmen Laforet and realised how mistaken we had been. Written quickly, in barely a few months, expressly to take part in the first Nadal literary prize (which it won), Nada (Nothing) took the Spanish readership by storm. First published in 1944, barely five years after the end of the civil war, it now appears in English for the first time, in a fluid translation by Edith Grossman.
The author was 23, and it is hard to understand how someone so young, within the isolation of Franco's Spain, should have been able to produce such an accomplished novel, so powerful in its story and so polished in its style. With Nada, Laforet broke Spanish literature free from the cumbersome shadow of 19th-century prose and the cold, censored rhetoric of Spanish fascism. Read in Argentina before the military dictatorship, it spoke to us of a state of fear and oppression that we could not know was threatening us; read in English today, it retains, within the now alien world it depicts, a note of warning and salutary unease.
Nada tells the story of Andrea who, like Laforet herself, leaves her native Canary Islands at the age of 18 to live in her grandmother's house in Barcelona, with the intention of studying literature at the university. Besides her grandmother, the house is inhabited by her two uncles, Juan and Roman, her aunt Angustias, the maid Antonia, and Juan's wife, Gloria, plus a menagerie of cats, an old dog and a parrot. Andrea is a sort of 20th-century Alice, fallen into a Wonderland whose characters and rules she fails to understand, and whose maze of family dramas she must reluctantly follow, beset by narrow-mindedness, poverty, violence and hunger.
Gloria has been Roman's mistress before and after her marriage to Juan, the straight-laced Angustias has been having an affair with her married boss, the grandmother (who never sleeps) fawns over her two sons while disdaining her daughters - three of them managed to leave the dreadful house long ago, including Andrea's mother. The maze spreads outside the house, into the postwar city, into the gambling den kept by Gloria's sister, into the university circles of would-be artists, into the dark streets and crumbling churches. Even Andrea's relationship with her best friend Ena provides another twist in the course, when Andrea discovers that Ena's mother was once humiliated by her uncle Roman and that Ena's friendship serves to accomplish a terrible revenge. Read More

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Latin American Literature

Book Review: Nada by Carmen Laforet

Fernanda Eberstadt reviews Carmen Laforet's Nada.

I have to admit that, until a month ago, I had never heard of Carmen Laforet. 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.

"Nada" was Laforet’s first novel. It was originally published in 1945, when its author was 23, and it created a sensation in Barcelona. 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.

"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.

Laforet makes us feel the force of this young woman’s long pent-up hunger to escape the oppressiveness of village life and her convent education. For years, Andrea has feasted on childhood memories of her maternal grandparents’ apartment in Barcelona, a haven of sophistication and ease from which she, because of her parents’ death and the war, has long been cut off.

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Spanish Literature

Nada by Carmen Laforet

This remarkable novel has a long history in Europe, Spain most particularly, but a very limited one here in the United States. A British translation from the Spanish was done almost half a century ago, and a little-known academic publisher issued one a decade and a half ago, but copies of both are limited and fairly hard to come by. So this new translation by the redoubtable Edith Grossman is especially welcome, as it makes available to readers here a coming-of-age novel that is far more mature and stylistically accomplished than the most famous American example of the genre, J.D. Salinger's vastly overrated The Catcher in the Rye.

Carmen Laforet was in her early 20s when she wrote Nada and 23 when it was published in her native Spain and became the first recipient of that country's celebrated Nadal Prize. Its frank, unsparing depiction of Barcelona in the aftermath of Spain's destructive 1936-39 Civil War caused a sensation, and its spare literary style -- impeccably rendered by Grossman -- had considerable influence on subsequent Spanish and European literature. "It has never been out of print," the Guardian reported when Laforet died three years ago, "and, even today, sells several thousand copies a year."

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Spanish Literature

Nada by Carmen Laforet

Few people have entered literature more dramatically than Carmen Laforet. She was 23 when the unpublished Nada (Nothing) won the 1944 Nadal Prize; it has remained in print in Spain ever since. It still surprises that this powerful, albeit implicit, indictment of Franco's dictatorship got past the censors. At the time, it was seen as a sensationalist novel about violent, mad, abnormal people. Today, when Nada is recognised as one of the few great novels to be written during the dictatorship, its portrayal of a crushed, starving middle-class family in a sordid Barcelona reveals how violent abnormality was the norm of life under fascism.

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Spanish Literature