With Nada – “Nothing” or “Nothingness” – published in 1945, Carmen Laforet (above) is one of those said to have established the school of Tremendismo. A lot happens in Nada and every breathless page seems laden with significance. The catastrophe comes in the end – but it is not as we might imagine.

Eighteen-year-old Andrea comes to live with relatives in Barcelona while she studies literature. She arrives late at night to meet a frail grandmother, two uncles, grotesque in their violence and vanities, the wife of one who courts delusion and cards to escape her regular beatings, a baby whose head is constantly turned to someone’s breast to stop him seeing, an arbitrarily authoritarian aunt, an ancient servant with greenish teeth, a dog, a cat and a parrot.

Andrea goes to wash in icy water and the bathroom is alive: “Like a witches’ house. The stained walls had traces of hook-shaped hands, of screams of despair. Everywhere the scaling walls opened their toothless mouths oozing dampness . . . Madness smiled from the bent taps.”

Andrea’s “intoxicated” vision continues. The flat crawls with cockroaches and bedbugs. What food there is, is hardly fit to eat. Everyone hears the rages of the men, the weeping of the woman. Everyone enters her room at will, checks through her belongings.

For all its bizarre verismo, Nada is a parable about the effects of civil war. In the immediate background lie memories of betrayal, cruelty, loss, ugliness and pain.

Carmen Laforet was 23 when she wrote it. Her nickname was “the strange girl”. She died in 2004, still refusing to take part in literary life. At the end, as she leaves, Andrea says: “I was taking nothing from the house on Calle de Aribau. At least, that’s what I thought then.” Laforet’s “nothing” is a substantial legacy.

Nada by Carmen Laforet

Harvill Secker, £16.99

Buy the book here at the offer price of £15.29 (free p&p)

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