Carmen Laforet, much more than ‘Nada’

Carmen Laforet (1921-2004) is much more than the author of ‘Nada’, the novel that shook the gray and lethargic post-war literary panorama and consecrated its young author with the Nadal Prize in 1944. In the ‘Laforet Year’ the Instituto Cervantes and Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) dedicate the exhibition ‘Next Destination’ to her, which reviews the figure and work of the writer, claiming her as one of the most influential of the 20th century.

On display until May 29, the exhibition traces Laforet’s life and creative career through more than two hundred pieces: unpublished manuscripts, documents, articles, family photographs, paintings, letters, audiovisuals, drawings, personal objects such as his typewriter, -a blue Olivetti-, his pen, and various editions of his other books, eclipsed by the importance of ‘Nada’.

The star piece is the first pages of the ‘Nada’ manuscript. Seven sheets of paper with their tight handwriting and their erasures that are exhibited for the first time. Neither had the typescript that Laforet presented to Nadal been exposed, nor had a recording with the author’s voice been released reading the first chapter of her legendary novel, from the United States Library of Congress.

They are now exhibited together with two reports on ‘Nada’ from 1945 in which the Francoist censors brand the novel as “morbid” and say that it threatens “against dogma or morality”. They describe it as “bland, without any style or literary value” to conclude that “there is no problem in its authorization.”

The exhibition includes a copy of its first edition in Destino in 1945, dedicated by Laforet to her future husband, Manuel Cerezales, who in 1944 ran a small publishing house and recommended that she try to present it to the newly created Nadal Prize. Laforet wrote it when he was only 23 years old. She was a perfect stranger in the literary world, but she changed the pace of Spanish literature narrating in the first person the disappointments of the young Andrea, who will see her dreams crumble because of a suffocating environment, the author’s excuse to criticize the Barcelona bourgeoisie postwar.

«Laforet does not run out in his first title. After ‘Nada’, there is much more, and that much must be discovered”, challenges José Teruel, professor of literature and curator together with Ana Cabello of an exhibition “that recreates the spirit of a decisive woman in our culture”, according to Luis García Montero, director of Cervantes.

Model

“Her production was sustained over time and has great coherence,” says Ana Cabello, who highlights Laforet as a “model and driving force for other writers.” “It was a reference for many writers, not only post-war, but current, such as Rosa Montero, Soledad Puértolas, Juana Salabert or Marta Sanz,” says Agustín Cerezales Laforet, one of the author’s five children and responsible for the activities of the ‘ Laforet Year’, the centenary that began last September.

The exhibition proposes to rediscover Laforet’s other novels: ‘The Island and the Demons’ (1952); ‘La mujer nueva’ (1955), about her reconversion to Catholicism, and 1956 National Literature Prize; ‘The Sunstroke’ (1963); ‘Paralelo 35’ (1967), which marked the beginning of her longest narrative silence, and ‘Al Volver la Esquina’ (1975), which she did not want to publish -it appeared after the writer’s death- and of which the galley proofs (print proofs) with annotations by the author and three typewritten pages.

His storybooks are also exhibited, -‘The girl and other stories’ (1953) and ‘The call’ (1954)- short novels,- ‘The piano’ (1952), ‘Un courtship’ (1953), ‘The called’ (1954)-, his two travel books -‘Gran Canaria’ (1961) and ‘My first trip to the USA’ (1981), many of his 400 articles and part of his correspondence with Ramón J. Sender, Elena Fortún , Juan Ramón Jiménez, Gerald Brenan or José María Pemán.

Cover of the recent Ukrainian translation of ‘Nada’ /

CR

The curators highlight that ‘Nada’ is the Spanish novel with the most translations, after Don Quixote, and includes 120 covers in many languages ​​in the sample: from the first translation into French in 1948 to the recent version in Persian, in 2021. The last is the Ukrainian translation, which arrived in Spain a few days ago from Kiev, the massacred capital of the country invaded by Putin, and without time to reproduce it in the exhibition along with the versions of ‘Nada’ in Italian, English, German, Swedish, Dutch , Portuguese, Chinese, Arabic, Bulgarian, Czech, Korean and much more.

Carmen Laforet photographed by Manuel Cerezales. / CR

long silences

Born in Barcelona on September 6, 1921, Carmen Laforet spent her childhood and adolescence in the Canary Islands. She returned to Barcelona in 1939, just after the war, to study Philosophy and Law, careers that she did not complete. She had lost her mother, and her father had remarried. In 1942 he moved to Madrid, where he would write ‘Nada’, a complete upheaval in the wasteland of post-war Spanish literature that influenced the renewal that Cela began that year with ‘La familia de Pascual Duarte’ and which in 1947 Delibes would confirm by winning Nadal with ‘The shadow of the cypress is long’.

After her marital separation from the journalist and critic Manuel Cerezales, with whom she had five children in eleven years, Laforet settled in Rome, where she spent a long time away from the publishing world, until she began the trilogy ‘Three steps out of time’ which was opened with ‘Insolación’ and that I would not see concluded. The second delivery, ‘When turning the corner’, would not see the light until shortly after her death.

Laforet spent more than half his life fleeing from noise and fame. Since that shy girl aroused unanimous praise with her first novel, the demands of public life and her literary circles became very difficult for her. She never stopped writing, but she published with droppers and kept very long silences. She died in Madrid on February 28, 2004, she suffered from senile dementia in the last decade of her life.