The grand family apartment that Andrea remembers from childhood visits is an unkempt, dirty, and subdivided “atmosphere of perverse people and furniture,” a gothic remnant of a bygone world. The Barcelona of 1940, under Franco’s repressive totalitarianism, disappoints at every turn. A young woman with ambition in this city, the retrospective first-person narrative insists, is anything but welcome. The novel, however, clobbers Andrea’s pluck, her hankering for beauty, her ravenous desire to get free. The looming university that she has come to the big city to attend strikes her “as if it were a solemn gesture of welcome.” In spite of all indications otherwise, Andrea feels that everything awaits. She remarks the nearness of the ocean, the closeness of the crowd, and the charm of “the invariably sad lights,” willfully remaking Civil War–ravaged Barcelona into a gleaming and expectant urban space. In the opening scene of the Spanish-language novel, a young orphan from the provinces disembarks from a train in Barcelona to find no one waiting for her.Īndrea ignores the whipping night winds, lumps her book-laden valise, and hails “one of those old horse-drawn carriages that have reappeared since the war.” It materializes at the curb like an anemic ghost. Carmen Laforet’s Nada (1944) begins with expectations unmet.
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