Young, different and desperate to belong

Fiction:Carmen Laforet's Nada could have been written in the 19th century, or sometime last week. But it wasn't. This quasi-autobiographical debut novel, which she wrote at the age of 23, was first published in 1945, on having won the Premio Nadal.

It made her famous and gave the Spanish reading youth a cult novel, leaving her with a weighty albatross that was to overshadow her subsequent literary career as well as her life. Here was a daring, melancholic portrait of a society still limping in the bitter aftermath of the Spanish Civil War; here was a place where young intellectuals tended to brood and suffer and largely wallow in their despair. If it is a book about Spain, it is also a novel about being young and helpless and unsettled.

Yet the larger cultural context - which has given the book such a lofty status and made the narrator, Andrea, a young girl who arrives in Barcelona from the provinces, full of soon-to-be-shattered hope - is almost irrelevant. This is a novel about being young and desperate to belong, but only to something that is good and acceptable. Andrea arrives in Barcelona at midnight, far later than she had planned, "on a train different from the one I had announced, and nobody was waiting for me". It sets the scene. She finds herself at the door of a flat she had been to years before as a small child. It is her grandmother's flat - dark, chaotic, filthy and inhabited by the old lady's grown sons, a daughter-in-law and an embittered daughter.

Andrea's response to the madness is brilliantly handled. Here is family at its most crazed. The old lady is brave, saintly and quite deluded about her revolting offspring, and is no longer the beautiful woman she once was - that self lives on now only in pictures of some 50 years earlier. Her bickering sons, Roman and Juan, are failed artists, while Gloria, Juan's wife, considers herself trapped by life and motherhood, and finds some element of random comfort in reminding herself and others of her physical charms - "aren't I pretty?"

Andrea's other life is the university, where she meets up with various friends - most intriguingly Ena, the golden-girl daughter of a cosmopolitan clan that travels widely and never settles anywhere for very long. Thin and quiet, Andrea attempts to make the best of living in cramped quarters in which the dirty bathroom and the lack of hot water leave her feeling unwashed and defeated.

As she dreams of success and romance, the family rampages around her. The old grandmother emerges as the tragic heart of the book and could well have stepped from the pages of Lorca. The rest of the family belongs to the Deep South of Faulkner. Juan and his wife battle like depraved curs, and the vivid, rich physicality of Laforet's prose - which has been well translated by Edith Grossman - conveys the frenzy, tension and futility of their lives.

When away from the family, with her college peers, Andrea is conscious of how different she is. Her yearning is obvious but she never becomes self-absorbed because she is too aware of the drama going on around her. In contrast to the cartoon violence of the unhappy married couple is the squalid romance of Roman, who plays his music and dreams his dreams and represents disaster for any susceptible girl. Laforet wisely avoids the obvious here and it becomes easy to trust Andrea and feel for her when her friendship with Ena, having become intimate, seems to fade.

Just when it appears that Andrea will remain a detached reporter, ever alert to the next domestic sideshow, she admits to wanting to fall in love with a male friend who seems to like her. She can't sleep and sees her life improving through a new relationship. Again, Laforet avoids the obvious.

Nada (Nothing) remains very much a young person's novel, and one free from pretension. It carries its darkness more convincingly than one might think.

Above all, Andrea is sympathetic and believable. However crazy her relatives appear, however excessive their antics and however fairytale-like her eventual salvation may seem, it is a narrative that tingles with recognition.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

Nada By Carmen Laforet, translated by Edith Grossman Harvill Secker, 241pp. £16.99