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. […]
Carmen Laforet wrote this at 23. What. How. Time’s a-ticking for me I suppose. The main character, Andrea, had my heart from the start, her desire for independence, her dreams of Barcelona which are swiftly crushed by her dysfunctional family. At first, it’s her Aunt Angustias that seems the most overbearing, telling her that “in […]
With the first chapter of the book we are at once conscious of the unspeakable absurdities of life, of a thumping rhythm of isolation carrying its beat across desolate roads, into unsolved conflicts, and through crowds of unknown faces, leading us towa…
A conversation with Sally Perret
Nada, a book of madness, trauma and grotesqueness that encase its pages. Nada was a book full of drama, conflict and messiness from all characters. Like Bombal’s novel I found it so hard to like anyone, when I started to like someone or feel sorry for them I would quickly realize that they sucked as …
This book made me sad, happy and at many points angry at the characters, especially the men. I found myself wanting to know how the events of the story would unfold. This novel was more of what I usually read in terms of structure and style. So far this is the book I have enjoyed […]
Okay, let me just say this up front: There isn’t a single universe where Andrea’s family would win that. For context, “Nada” is a coming-of-age novel written by Carmen Laforet about an orphan who moves to Barcelona post-Spanish Civil War in order to attend university. She moves into her formerly-wealthy-but-now-poor grandmother’s apartment with several relatives: […]
I must say this course was a breath of fresh air (cliche, I know…). But for real, being able to guide ourselves through each week was nice. It wasn’t just sitting in a lecture hall with a professor talking at you and expecting you to retain all information imaginable for a test in a couple […]
I decided to look up the author, as I do with most of what I read, and was surprised to find that Françoise Sagan was only 18 years old when she published Bonjour Tristesse. Also that it was her first novel and is her most popular novel ever published. This was inspiring to find. That […]
While reading, ‘Nada’, by Carmen Laforet, I was by far the most emotionally involved I have been since beginning this course. Because of this, I have a lot of different thoughts about this story, and thus my blog post will probably be more disorga…
