Carmen Laforet's Nada: From Letter to Novel

Before she began to compose her first novel Nada, Carmen Laforet wrote many letters to friends about her experiences in Barcelona shortly after the Spanish Civil War. These letters contain the seeds of the novel and (as is argued in this article) inspired a number of epistolary features in the novel's structure and styleits first-person narrative voice that begs for an addressee, its enigmatic ellipses, gaps and fissures, its voyeurism and its embedded letters. Considering Nada's epistolarity answers some of the questions that have been raised about the novel's supposed autobiographical and confessional characteristics.