The Second Most Popular Spanish Novel

Reader Avi wondered why Carmen Laforet’s mediocre novel Nada is the second most widely read Spanish novel in the world. This is a great question that I want to answer.

Yes, the novel is not that great. Laforet wrote it when she was in her early twenties, and it’s good for somebody very young, inexperienced, and very self-involved. It’s deathly tedious to readers outside of that category. But the novel’s success is mostly due to two big misunderstandings.

When Nada first came out, it was the post-war time in Spain. People wanted to talk about the civil war. It was a terrible thing they had just experienced, and of course they wanted to discuss it. But there was censorship. Everybody was scared. Nobody knew how to broach the subject. When Laforet’s novel about a messed-up family came out, people chose to believe that Laforet was trying to say that the family was messed up because of the war. But what she actually wanted to talk about was family dysfunction that was entirely apolitical. People kept trying to squeeze some political statements out of Laforet but she didn’t give in. Her subsequent writing made it clear that she was interested in what makes a family collapse not as a result of any political upheavals but because of internal dynamics. There was an enormous pressure on Laforet to play the role of “the voice of the young generation that has something crucial to say about the current moment”, and she hated that.

Then something even more ridiculous happened. In 1951, a famous American Hispanist Gerald Brennan read Nada and Laforet’s second novel and attached a woke explanation to them. He published an article in the NYTimes where he said that Laforet’s novels had done “more for the liberation of Spanish women than the entire last 50 years of history.” Laforet at that time was a deeply religious Catholic pregnant with her fourth child but who cares about reality when the NYTimes says something different? Laforet’s Nada became assigned reading in every Spanish course on every US campus. It still is, and each new generation of Spanish professors struggles to massage the novel into some far-left mold that its very conservative author couldn’t have begun to imagine.

I don’t assign it to my students.