Student Blogs

Stories have to start somewhere, but even stories have stories. To answer the question of “backstories”, and how important they are to novels, well they are quite significant, even if not directly shown. For example, to understand the atrocious history of the Spanish Civil War, we find a backstory to give context to Andrea, our […] read full post >>

When I think about Nada, what stays with me most is how difficult it is to explain what the novel is “about” without saying that not much really happens. Andrea arrives in Barcelona full of expectation, spends a year surrounded by hunger, tension, and emotional decay, and then leaves feeling like she has gained nothing. […] read full post >>

At the beginning of the book, I was immediately hit by the environment and emotions of Andrea who was arriving in Barcelona with lots of hope. Soon after arriving the harsh atmosphere of the home created by her relatives became clear. The home was small, but was heavy with tension that I found myself finding […] read full post >>

Reading Nada honestly felt kind of heavy, but in a way that stuck with me. It follows Andrea, a young woman who moves to Barcelona after the Spanish Civil War to start university. She shows up excited and hopeful, imagining this new chapter of her life, and then almost immediately that optimism gets crushed. The […] read full post >>

This book was unsatisfying in so many ways: the novel felt extremely unfinished by the end due to Agostino’s glaringly evident “mommy issues,” self-centered personality and the lack of character development.   Agostino’s Oedipus complex has got to be a primary source for Freud’s central psychoanalytic theory TT. He beings being utterly infatuated with his […] read full post >>

Well what a read! I couldn’t put the book down once I started. Through couch reading, reading while cooking, dinner reading, and back to the couch reading, this book kept me engaged and not knowing what would come next. Agostino started off weirdly, I thought he might have some Oedipus issues, but soon I realized … read full post >>

Reading Nada felt emotionally heavy for me, not because of dramatic events, but because of how much is left unresolved. There is no intense plot pushing the story forward and no clear moment of triumph or closure. Instead, the novel feels like a reflection of real life, where things don’t always get better in obvious […] read full post >>

I'm quite confident in my prediction that the whole class thought of Freud when they opened this book up. The character dynamics undeniably parallel what is spoken about in Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, where famously claims that "while... read full post >>

I'm quite confident in my prediction that the whole class thought of Freud when they opened this book up. The character dynamics undeniably parallel what is spoken about in Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, where famously claims that "while... read full post >>

Reading Nada felt less like reading a novel and more like being dropped into someone else’s extremely tense family group chat, except it’s set in postwar Barcelona and everyone is emotionally unwell in a deeply artistic way. What got me wasn’t the plot (which I’ll spare you), but the feeling of the book: that constant […] read full post >>

ok first impressions I AM SLIGHTLY TRAUMATIZED?? I knew from the recap in class I would be getting into a surprising book and boy did it deliver! Sometimes Freud just keeps finding his way into my peaceful life… The main plot of this book is a son’s attraction to his mother and the overlapping emotions […] read full post >>

I think Nada was an interesting read and surprisingly I actually enjoyed reading it. The book starts off with Andrea arriving in Barcelona with a lot of hope in the middle of the night, which is later than her relatives had expected her to come. However, this hope and the positive feeling about her future […] read full post >>

“But he wasn’t a man” My question: How do you relate to Agostino? How do you not?   -LS read full post >>

When I first finished Nada, my immediate reaction was kind of anticlimactic. After a full year of Andrea’s life in Barcelona, she leaves feeling like she’s taken nothing away from the experience. She didn’t have a crazy transformation, didn’t really take away a clear lesson, and the story ended with no dramatic resolution. Just… nada. […] read full post >>

Song of the week: Mother – John Lennon Ew! That’s what I thought before I had even finished the first page and also what I was thinking while reading the 100 pages that followed. Surprisingly, this book was quite interesting despite all the weirdness. The fact that the main character, Agostino, is only thirteen years […] read full post >>