I’m continuing to work my way through the #EU27 project in a desultory fashion. It tends to get as far as looking at a book, wondering whether it would fit, reading the blurb, and then putting it down again. Very handily, my work book club decided to read Nada, by Carmen Laforet, which, at the time of posting, I can count for Spain.
It’s a marvellously gothic book, with mysterious relations, sinister servants, and a decaying apartment. It’s an apartment rather than a house, because this is very much urban gothic: the narrator, Andrea, has moved to Barcelona to study English. I’ve never been to Barcelona, but by the end of this I felt as if I had. There’s a very compelling sense of place: windswept squares, cramped alleys, the scent of the sea. I’d like to reread when I’m more in the mood for descriptive prose.
I found Andrea a rather frustrating, passive, character, to whom things happened, or didn’t. That felt entirely plausible, however; I remember being in my late teens and early twenties and just waiting to find out what was the next thing that was going to happen to me. Actually, it reminded me more than anything of Hilary Mantel’s An Experiment In Love (mind you, that was also a book club pick).
What I completely failed to get was how deeply the book was affected by Franco’s Spain. Part of that is an artefact of having been written and published there: apparently there was a lot of censorship going on. Actually, it felt much more recent than that. I don’t know whether that was a quality of the translation or of the original, whether the absence of contextual detail set it free from time and place, or whether I was just missing a whole lot of clues. Quite possibly it was the latter.
I’m glad I read it, anyway, and will probably read it again. Hurrah for book club. Next time they’re reading The Count of Monte Cristo. Which is fine by me, though I can’t count it towards this challenge. As to that, it’s either going to be Mrs Mohr Goes Missing (Poland), The City and the Mountains (Portugal), or Inlands (Sweden). You’ll find out here. Sooner or later.
Kathleen Jowitt 