An article in The Conversation, by Ruth McHugh-Dillon, was the first I knew of Spanish author Carmen Laforet (1921-2004) and her 1945 novel entitled Nothing.

Quick diversion: In Spanish the title is Nada, which means "nothing", but for some reason the English translations leave it as Nada, rather than translating it. Which I find odd. I read it in Spanish, and so feel no need to adhere to this convention... It was first translated into English in 1958, but did not become widely available until 2007.

The article begins: "If you haven't heard of Nada, one of the most important European novels of the 20th century, you're not alone." OK, so I needn't feel too bad, then...

Laforet was 23 when she wrote the book (which is partly autobiographical), and she wrote it in a hurry as she planned to submit it as a contender for the inaugural Nadal Prize. Its fast pace and no-nonsense style reflect its rapid production, but obviously did not detract from its quality, as it went on to win the competition.

The story is narrated by Andrea, a young orphan woman who moves in with relatives in Barcelona in order to study literature at university. It's very, very atmospheric, and because it's peopled by a cast of highly unpredictable characters, it's quite gripping. You never quite know what's anyone is going to do from one moment to the next. We are literally in "man bites dog" territory.

As well as winning instant acclaim at home, Nothing made a string of heavyweight Latin American authors reconsider their views on the writing coming out of Spain. Here's Mario Vargas Llosa, for example, in his Introduction to the English edition (translated by Edith Grossman and available here): "Until I came to Spain in 1958, I don't think I had read any contemporary Spanish writers living in the Iberian Peninsula because of a prejudice as widespread in the Latin America of those years as it was unjust: Everything published OVER THERE reeked of fustiness, sacristy, and Francoism. Which is why I didn't know until now the tender, asphyxiating story of Andrea." Or Alberto Manguel: "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... Then, one day, we discovered Nada by Carmen Laforet and realised how mistaken we had been."


Barcelona, 2020

The novel's calibre is all the more remarkable because it emerged, McHugh-Dillon tells us, "in one of the darkest and most stagnant periods of Spanish history". The Civil War formally came to an end in 1939, but in the mid-1940s, when the rest of Europe was starting to come out of the traumas of World War II, Spain was still mired in one of its bleakest periods: "These early years of Franco's regime are known in Spain as 'the hunger years'."

And it's true that Andrea and the relatives she goes to stay with are often literally hungry. We can only speculate on the extent to which it's starvation that drives their extraordinary behaviour. Because, frankly, they're a shower...

Andrea arrives at the family home in Aribau Street at midnight, having been delayed, and she is promptly ushered into a veritable house of horrors. Dimly lit, cobweb-festooned, and dank-smelling, it's a shadow of its former self. On the death of the grandfather, three years previously, half the family's apartment was sold off. The readjustments this necessitated have never really been finalized, and everyone lives in a state of chaos and disorder. Andrea goes to wash, and is horrified: "That bathroom seemed like a witches' house. The stained walls preserved the print of hook-shaped hands, of screams of despair. Everywhere the flaking walls opened their toothless mouths, oozing dampness... Madness smiled from the bent taps." They allocate her a room that "looked like the attic of an abandoned palace"; her bed reminds her of a coffin.

No less Gothic than the surroundings are the people. There's the sinister black-clad maid, Antonia; there's the cadaverous Juan, one of Andrea's uncles; there's Gloria, his sharp-faced, red-haired wife, who whispers to Andrea, "Are you scared?"; there's the imperious Angustias, her aunt, who soon announces her intention of making sure the young guest learns "obedience"; and there's the tiny grandmother ("I never sleep, child... I never, ever sleep"). There's a mad parrot, and a "ruinous" cat. And the next day she meets the other uncle, Roman, who is capable of charm, in a loose-cannon kind of way, but also has a wide range of insults on hand for those who cross him.

It doesn't take Andrea long to discover that the family members -- with the exception of the kindly but ineffectual grandma -- are all at each other's throats. They spy on each other; they needle each other; they lie to each other. There are constant arguments over comparatively trivial things, with insults flying, and blows always primed to follow. There is rarely any calm. Roman and Juan have an ambivalent relationship, usually attacking but occasionally defending each other. You feel confident of the sanity of neither. Violence towards women, meanwhile, is par for the course. Andrea is never harmed physically (though there are certainly occasions when she's pretty scared), but Gloria is regularly the victim of vicious attacks, and Angustias cops the force of Juan's temper at times too. The talentless Juan is a painter, but brings in little money. Gloria is the one who keeps the family afloat by means of selling unused household items, and playing cards for money at the establishment her sister runs in a dodgy area of town (both these profitable activities bring the wrath of the brothers down on her head on a regular basis).

Roman is the most curious figure, and a pivotal character in the book. Still a gifted musician, he exercises a marked power of attraction, including -- initially -- over Andrea. When he plays for her, she is enraptured: "And it came to me in waves: first, innocent memories, dreams, struggles, my own hesitant present, and then, sharp joys, sorrows, despair, a significant tension in life, a negation into nothing. My own death, the feeling of my total despair being turned into beauty, an anguished harmony without any light."


Leon, rather than Barcelona. But it's the kind of thing that would have fascinated Andrea: "The Cathedral rose in a severe harmony... A peace, an imposing clarity, poured out from the marvellous architecture. Around its dark shapes the brilliant night stood out, turning slowly to the rhythm of the hours"

The war, so recently ended, runs along in the background of the story, specifically rearing its head only occasionally. Angustias says her brothers have been "troubled by their nerves" since the conflict. It was during that time that Gloria came to the house: "There was hunger, as much dirt as there is now, and a man in hiding because they were hunting him down to kill him: Angustias's boss, Don Jeronimo... Nobody trusted me." There has been some kind of rivalry between the brothers over Gloria; there's been a betrayal that landed Roman in prison, where he was tortured; the grotesque Antonia is kept on in the household because her testimony helped get him out; and Angustias has been involved in an affair with Don Jeronimo (married).

As Rosa Montero writes in the Prologue to the version I read, "The Aribau house, which once was a normal and happy home... is a precise, chilling portrait of post-war Spain; and those two brothers who love and hate each other, who try to kill each other and mourn each other, who harbour a past full of betrayals and denunciations, are an obvious transcript of the fratricidal madness of 1936."

Andrea, finding Angustias overly controlling and disconcertingly affectionate at times, is very glad to see her pack her bags, and head off to a convent. Her friends, "like a flock of crows perching on the branches of the tree where a dead man hangs", accompany her final days at home.

Meanwhile, Andrea is trying to navigate the student world, where her friends are generally much wealthier than she is. One of these friends is Ena, who is kind to Andrea, but develops an obsession with Roman (the weirdness of the household also exerts a lugubrious power of attraction over this rich girl, used to orderly middle-class ways).

This relationship not only leaves Andrea and Ena's boyfriend, Jaime, out in the cold, but viscerally upsets Ena's mother. In the course of a long tete-a-tete with Andrea, we learn that she was besotted by this same Roman in her youth, and he manipulated and humiliated her. She asks Andrea to somehow intervene with Ena, without mentioning her story.

But Ena has found out anyway, and her intentions towards Roman are vengeance-driven, rather than love-driven. She discovers that he's involved in some dirty kind of smuggling, and uses this information to gain power over him. He ends up committing suicide. Juan is heartbroken, and torments Gloria still more... Even Andrea feels a nostalgia for this flawed man.

Finally, Andrea is given the chance to leave. Ena, now living with her parents in Madrid, invites Andrea to come to the capital where she can work, study, and live with Ena's family until she gets herself on her feet. It's a liberation of sorts, although she admits she no longer has the same illusions that she brought to Barcelona. Ena's father comes to fetch her, and the novel ends like this: "The morning air was exciting. The ground seemed damp from the night dew. Before I climbed into the car, I looked up at the house where I had lived for a year. The first rays of the sun were hitting its windows. A few moments later, Calle de Aribau and Barcelona in its entirety were behind me."



Almost nothing is said about the politics of the day. And yet, as Vargas Llosa says, "Politics weighs on the entire story like an ominous silence, like a spreading cancer that devours and destroys everything... The unsurpassable title says everything about the novel and the city where it takes place... Nothing exists beyond the small larval world that surrounds the characters."

Another theme that crackles along under the surface like a fire in a coalmine is sexuality. It's never really explicit, but it's palpable, in all sorts of exchanges.

Oppressive politics and repressed sexuality mean there is always something stopping Vargas Llosa's "small larval world" working happily. There is still, despite the awful violence, some unaccountable spark between Gloria and Juan. Reflecting on one terrible night, Andrea recalls: "I'd seen them again melted into one, to the point of feeling the pounding of each other's blood, loving each other, leaning on each other under the weight of the same sorrow... If on that night -- I thought -- the world had ended, or one of them had died, their story would have been completely closed and beautiful, like a circle. That's how it happens in novels, in movies, but not in life... I was realizing, for the first time, that everything continues, goes grey, is ruined by living. That there is no end to our story until death comes and the body decays."

And, indeed, the end of this particular story sees Gloria, tired of being a punching bag, plotting to have Juan committed to a mental hospital, an act vigorously opposed by his bird-like mother...

As Rosa Montero says, "It is a cruel story, the story of life when it turns bad."

Manguel again: "Chesterton said somewhere that more terrible than a maze with a monster at its centre is a maze that has no centre... Nada is a story that winds and folds on to itself: the haunted house is within a haunted city and contains the haunted souls of Andrea and her kin, each coil deepening the feeling of loss and vacuity of the other."



Brenna Casey points out: "Scholars often align Nada with Tremendismo -- a flickering literary movement that emerged out of post–Civil War Spain and emphasized rote violence and the grotesque. Presaged over a century earlier by the murky, malevolent stylings of Francisco de Goya’s gruesome Black Paintings, made in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, Tremendismo’s bitter pessimism is marked by bleak ochres, grisly sputtering, gauzy impressions, antic behavior, and unalterable darkness."

And yet, Laforet doesn't paint everything in black, despite the undoubted horrors Andrea is experiencing. The book is often funny. It has pantomime qualities. So, says Casey, without being "glib or unsentimental, Laforet adds a wrinkle to Tremendismo’s perceived nihilism".

In light of my recent "authors' private lives" theme, I find it interesting to read that Laforet was a genuine pioneer, but an unobtrusive one. She very deliberately steered away from the literary circus: "Laforet was considered a mystery because she played no part in literary life. For decades, this meant that she was dubbed 'timid' and 'strange'. But, in fact, there was little truth in this. She told [novelist Ramon J.] Sender she did not like the political and social climate of the Franco dictatorship; that she stopped giving interviews because she was always asked whether she loved her books or children better; and that writers' circles -- full of 'envy, hostilities and quarrels' -- left her cold. Her son Agustin explained: 'Everything involved with being famous quite simply bored her.'" Good on her...