Okay, so “Agostino” isn’t your typical vacation read. Sure, it’s set in Italy during the summer, but it’s way more than just tanning and sand. It kinda takes you on this interesting ride through the mind of a 13 year old kid who’s suddenly hit with the first few harsh realities of the adult world […]
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I actually quite liked this one despite how long it was. Though I can’t tell how much of the writing style is Laforet and how much is the translation, it’s by far my favourite so far (though the bar is low). I’m starting to think it may not be the texts that are the issue […]
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Reading Agostino was a very unsettling but yet eye-opening about growing up too quickly, as Moravia shows adolescence not as an exciting transition, but something that I believe a lot of people can relate to which is confusing, and painful. Agosto’s relationship with his mother starts out as a very close one as they would […]
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Wow, Nada was an interesting, interesting read. It follows the story of a young girl post Spanish civil war moving to attend university. Our protagonist Andrea moves in with her extended family who seems to have lost almost everything due to the war, given that they were quite well off before the war. I […]
Posted in Blogs, Laforet | Tagged with Uncategorized
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 […]
Posted in Blogs | Tagged with blog, memory, reality, trauma, Uncategorized
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 […]
Posted in Blogs | Tagged with nada, Uncategorized
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 […]
Posted in Blogs, Laforet | Tagged with Barcelona, Carmen laforet, nada, Spain, Uncategorized, war
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 […]
Posted in Blogs, Laforet | Tagged with nada, Uncategorized, war
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 […]
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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. […]
Posted in Blogs, Laforet | Tagged with death, memory, Uncategorized, war
