| … a story that Carmen Laforet narrates in prose both exalted and icy, in which what is unspoken is more important than what is said, keeping the reader of the novel submerged in indescribable anguish from beginning to end
Mario Vargas Llosa
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Andrea, an impoverished eighteen-year-old girl travels to Barcelona to pursue her ambition of studying literature at the university. She arrives at night, by train, in a city that immediately imposes its bleak, post-Civil War atmosphere on her impressionable mind. She makes her way to the home of relatives, a house she has not visited since her childhood, and before long we realise that she has entered a very strange household indeed. Tension between her grandmother, her two eccentric uncles, an aunt, and the housekeeper is present from the moment of her arrival and it grows in claustrophobic intensity as this unforgettable story develops. Nada describes a young woman’s emergence from a life of cloying despair into the fresh new dawn of post-war enlightenment and promise. The spirit of war-torn, brutalised Barcelona – very different from the confident, prosperous Catalan capital we know today – hovers over this beautifully written and minutely observed novel.
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| A welcome rediscovery and a fascinating danse macabre
Daily Mail
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| An intricate and engaging portrait
Easy Living
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| Grossman’s translation is lithe and supple enough to convey much of the brilliance of Laforet’s description
Laura Barnett Daily Telegraph
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| Laforet develops her narrative in a series of cataclysmic, operatic confrontations, in which no holds are barred. The language...is poetic, melodramatic, hyperbolic. Yet it never feels forced or ersatz… Nada is Zola-esque...what particularly impresses is the haunted atmosphere, the intensity of the paranoia and the unpredictability, and the Cinderella-eyed sensibility of it’s heroine… A gothic horror story which deserves the widest possible readership
Alan Taylor Sunday Herald
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| Laforet's voice is calm and clear…this remarkably sophisticated novel …is unlike most Spanish literature of the time and before
Michael Eaude Independent
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| One of the best novels of the twentieth century.
Miguel Delibes author of The Heretic
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| One of the great classics of contemporary European literature.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon author of The Shadow of the Wind
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| One of the great novels of 1940s Spain… First published in Spain 60 years ago, Nada can now be enjoyed in Edith Grossman’s excellent new translation
Iam Thomson Sunday Telegraph
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| Read today, Nada surprises us with its modernity. By its absolute lack of sentimentality, in spite of the atrocities that it relates. By its exact style, clean, sharp as a crystal, and at the same time full of expressive force and poetic originality.
El Mundo
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Information
Vintage • General & literary fiction • Previous
ISBN: 0099494191
Publication date: 07/02/2008 • 256 pages • B format • EAN: 9780099494195 |
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