That illuminated twinkling of the stars brought back in a rush all my hopes regarding Barcelona until the moment I’d encountered this atmosphere of perverse people and furniture. Three stars were trembling in the soft blackness overhead, and when I saw them I felt a sudden desire to cry, as if I were seeing old friends, encountered unexpectedly. They had placed a candle on the piano because there were no light bulbs in the large chandelier.

In the centre, like a grave mound surrounded by mourners – that double row of disembowelled easy chairs – a divan covered by a black blanket, where I was to sleep. It looked like the attic of an abandoned palace it was, I later found out, the living room. A Chinese desk, paintings, ill-assorted furniture. A number of gilt mirrors with candelabra attached – some of them very valuable – on the walls. In the room they gave me was a grand piano, its keys uncovered. I don’t know how I managed to sleep that night. It’s a brilliant, but disturbing, opening to the story, and we feel for Andrea as she tries to reconcile this harrowing picture with her dreams of the city:

Cobwebs hang from the ceilings the rooms are bathed in an eerie greenish light the stained walls of the bathroom show ‘traces of hook-shaped hands, of screams of despair.’ (pg. Faced with her uncle Juan, Andrea sees a man with a face ‘full of hollows, like a skull in the light of the single bulb in the lamp.’ (pg. As Andrea enters her family’s home, a strange collection of ghoulish figures emerge from the shadows – in addition to her grandmother, Andrea is confronted by her aunt Angustias, her uncle Juan and his wife, Gloria, and the maid, Antonia. It’s the middle of the night, and as she approaches the flat in the Calle de Aribau, a sudden fear overtakes her emotions. Filled with all the hopes and expectations of a new life in the city and the prospect of studying literature at the University, she makes her way to her grandmother’s apartment where she is to live.

My edition of Nada is eloquently translated by Edith Grossman and comes with a useful introduction by Mario Vargas Llosa.Īs the story opens, we join Andrea, an eighteen-year-old girl, as she arrives in Barcelona. The book, which caused a bit of a sensation on its release, heralded the birth of an exciting new voice in Spanish Literature. Carmen Laforet was twenty-three years old when Nada, her first novel, won the prestigious Premio Nadal literary award in 1944.

Nada by carmen laforet in english