There are writers whose literary work has a narrative intention of the everyday without further pretensions. Thus they end up being labeled within one type of realism or another. These are authors who have you in front of the keyhole so that you discover life in its slightest occurrence, where the heroes are only survivors and the plot oozes and gives off only and exclusively life.
Carmen laforet was one of those writers devoted to the particular, to the rarity of the individual that flies over the manners and the times that they have to live.
Because realism always appears with greater intensity in those moments in which the particular story acquires the value of testimony of hard times. And in this particular space the novel becomes a sum of experiences between the tragic and the magical glow of hope. In the Spain of the 40s this type of narrative was called tremendous, and Carmen Laforet cultivated it with brilliant lucidity.
Top 3 recommended novels by Carmen Laforet
Nada
That remains, nothing, or that we are, nothing. Andrea is in charge of staging the void that opens underfoot when the mismatch between the personal and the social becomes more and more evident.
The character of Andrea leads us along the paths of circumstantial existentialism of a time like the Spanish postwar period. Normally an existential work boasts more or less dense philosophical approaches, more or less brilliant in its metaphorical presentation.
What the author did with this, her first novel, was to reconcile that freshness typical of the new with the intense need to compose a highly personal, ravishingly empathetic story where Andrea's days, her subjective descriptions of the Barcelona of the moment, her search for the beauty between vulgarity and the assumption of inertia towards the tragic.
Andrea is a buried cry of freedom, a contained impulse that in the end ends up exploding when they find their opportune moment, that moment in which life finally agrees with anyone who feels that destiny is not only to walk along the marked path. .
Around the corner
Laforet represents, once again, the creator devoured by his great work, an emblematic case of Patrick Süskind or John kennedy toole. Himself Ramón J. Sender He was captivated by this story and made it known to the author.
So everything that followed ended up composing a literary landscape indebted to Nada. In the case of Turning the Corner, his posthumous novel, at least it can be said that the moment in the life of the protagonist, Martín Soto, also offers glimpses of that freshness in the narrated perspective and the descriptions around Madrid in 1950.
When more than twenty years later, Martín Soto describes those days to us, we end up understanding life as a sum of anecdotes that lead us in a strange way towards a kind of predestination that seems to arise from chance and the ultimate will of emotions, those that they always outweigh reason.
The insolation
Again Martín Soto, that narrator of his own life that we met Around the corner. Only now it is time to know him in essence, in that period full of authenticity, rebellion and openness to sexual maturity.
In this book we meet Martín Soto between the ages of 14 and 16. He, who could be a wealthy boy, more or less, without major complications, decides to give way to what moves him inside.
The impressions about adolescence that this novel provides transcend the character and become a good reference to enter whenever necessary into that age in which we leave everything behind to relearn to look at a world that hid, in equal parts, lies and secrets. .
Other recommended books by Carmen Laforet…
The island and the demons
There may be some chance fortune in a first film. Because there is much of maximum interest in the first story that is decided to narrate. But the confirmation of the author or author comes with his second novel. In the case of Carmen Laforet, this novel supposed a sudden opening towards the clearing of her imagination where to see the exuberance of her narrative resources and her deep interest in the story from the most intensely intimate.
Marta Camino is a teenager who lives with her brother José and her sister-in-law Pino in a house on the outskirts of Las Palmas in 1938, towards the end of the civil war. With them, locked in a room, she consumes her mother, Teresa, who went crazy after an accident. This routine life of contained tensions is broken with the arrival of some relatives fleeing the war in the Peninsula: her paternal uncle Daniel, a musician by profession; her wife Matilde, a poet with strong conservative values, and her aunt Honesta, a romantic woman with a fickle personality.
They are accompanied by Pablo, a painter who travels to the island to see new scenes. Marta understands his presence as the promise of a different life, full of new sensations. The beautiful and overwhelming landscape becomes one more protagonist and witnesses the implacable discovery of the inner demons of the formidable characters and the progressive transformation of the young woman, who sees in the sea the route to her liberation.
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