![]() But the reader get’s the feeling that their poverty is of their own making. They live in filth and are slowly starving to death. A chasm divides the rich from the poor and Andrea’s family falls in amongst the latter. Nada is set after the Spanish Civil War in Franco’s Spain. Illusions are quickly brushed aside, though, and the realities of her new life exposed – squalor, petty melodrama and hunger. Her plan is to attend university and live with her dead mother’s family. ![]() I had heaped too many dreams onto this concrete fact for that first sound of the city not to seem a miracle”. On her first morning she tells us, “I was in Barcelona. To her, Barcelona is a glamorous city and she’s come there for all the cliché reasons that young people leave their homes in the country to travel to big cities. Repeatedly (and abruptly) leading the reader into dead ends.Īndrea, the narrator and heroine of the story, is an orphan. It’s a theme picked up by contemporary Spanish authors like Zafon in films like Pan’s Labyrinth and in Nada, Carmen Laforet’s award winning 1944 novel – translated by Edith Grossman – where the heroine is continuously wandering the hallways, streets and alleyways of Barcelona. Spanish literature can often have a labyrinthine quality to it, which isn’t surprising when you remember that Spain gave us Gaudi, Dali & Picasso. ![]() I’m not completely sure what to make of it. ![]()
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