Carmen Laforet

Carmen Laforet (born September 6, 1921, Barcelona, Spain—died February 28, 2004, Madrid) was a Spanish novelist and short-story writer who received international recognition when her novel Nada (1944; “Nothingness"; Eng. trans., Nada) won the first Nadal Prize.

Laforet was educated in Las Palmas, Canary Islands, and returned to Barcelona immediately after the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). The lives of the heroines in her novels strongly reflect the author’s personal experiences. Nada, Laforet’s first and most successful novel, presents the impressions of a young girl who returns to Barcelona from abroad after the war and discovers a sordid, chaotic atmosphere and intellectual emptiness. It is written in the postwar narrative style known as tremendismo, which is characterized by a tendency to emphasize violence and grotesque imagery. A novel read for its narrative, political, and existential elements, Nada is direct and unaffected.

In contrast to her first novel, Laforet’s later works, though better constructed, are sentimental and less intense. In 1952 she published La isla y los demonios (“The Island and the Demons”), also autobiographical in nature. Laforet’s conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1951 is strongly reflected in La mujer nueva (1955; “The New Woman”), in which a worldly woman rediscovers her faith. Although that novel received the Menorca Prize in 1955 and the Miguel de Cervantes Prize the following year, many critics consider its main character unrealistic and its statement of faith almost absurd to those who are not familiar with Laforet’s own faith. In 1961 she wrote Gran Canaria (“Grand Canary”), a guide to the island on which she grew up.

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