Carmen laforet

Portrait of Carmen Laforet colored.

Carmen Laforet Díaz (Barcelona, September 6, 1921-Majadahonda, February 28, 2004) was a Spanish writer. Her best-known work is the novel Nada, winner of the 1944 Nadal Prize.

Biography

She was born in Barcelona on September 6, 1921, the eldest daughter of a Barcelona architect and a teacher from Toledo. When she was two years old, her family moved to live on the island of Gran Canaria for work reasons by her father, who worked as a professor at the School of Industrial Expertise. His childhood and adolescence were spent there. After her, her brothers Eduardo and Juan were born, with whom according to the author she always got along well.

When her mother died, her father remarried and Carmen never had a good relationship with her stepmother. The author returned to the peninsula in 1939 to study Philosophy in Barcelona, and she lived there for three years. She then moved to study Law at the Central University of Madrid, but she never finished the studies she started.

In 1945 he published Nothing, a novel with which he won the first call in 1944 for the Nadal Prize from the Destino publishing house; It was a knock for the first post-war generation and a critical and public success that catapulted a very young Laforet to literary fame. A year later, she married the journalist and literary critic Manuel Cerezales, with whom she had five children, Marta, Cristina, Silvia, Manuel and Agustín, three of whom, Agustín Cerezales Laforet, Cristina Cerezales Laforet and Silvia Cerezales Laforet, have dedicated themselves to also writing. The marriage separated in 1970.

Calle General Pardiñas, Madrid

In 1952 he published The Island and the Demons, a novel set in the Canary Islands, where he had grown up. In 1955, La mujer nueva, marked by the religious experiences of the author. In fact, Ángeles Varela has shown that these three works: Nothing, The Island and the Demons and The New Woman, make up of facto a trilogy about the existential anguish of a woman, which is given an ending marked by personalism or Christian existentialism.

He followed in 1963 Sunstroke, the first volume of the trilogy Three steps out of time, after a long period in which he was also working on the other two volumes of the trilogy, although he only published the second, Al volver la esquina, the same year he died.

She traveled to the United States as a guest in 1965; about her experience in that country, she published the essay My first trip to the USA (1981); there she also met the novelist Ramón J. Sender, with whom she exchanged an interesting epistolary relationship. In 2003 she published the epistolary I can count on you , which contains a total of seventy-six letters in which she reveals her literary silence, her pathological insecurity and her social phobia. Her personal situation while she wrote those letters was hard, since she had separated in 1970 and lacked financial stability; General circumstances such as the political and social climate and her prevailing machismo meant that she, for example, had to answer questions in interviews such as whether she loved her children or her books more.

In his letters to Sender, he also laments the grayness of the literary world, which he saw as full of envy, enmity and quarrels. Laforet did not want to ascribe to any of "these warlike kingdoms", for which she, she assured, she was considered "the enemy of all". Sender, in turn, confesses to Laforet that "the little Caesar" he was the only person she held a grudge against. The author of Requiem for a Spanish peasant details her friend's anxiety crisis "because I don't accept being old". Religiosity was another of the themes of the letters that were written, since both believed in God, with different nuances, and shared their devotion to Saint Teresa of Jesus. The indefatigable Sender was the antithesis of her, but he constantly encouraged her to write.

Carmen Laforet also wrote short novels, storybooks, and travelogues. Among her storybooks are La llamada (1954) and The girl and other stories (1970). Almost all of Laforet's work revolves around the same central theme: the confrontation between youthful idealism and the mediocrity of the environment.

Little by little, she distanced herself from public life due to a degenerative disease that affected her memory (Alzheimer's) and left her speechless in the last years of her life. She passed away in Majadahonda, Madrid, on February 28, 2004.

In February 2007, as a commemoration of the third anniversary of his death, the publishing house Menoscuarto published for the first time a compilation of all his short stories, including five unpublished ones. In 2009, Cristina Cerezales published a book about her mother, Música blanca (Destino), where, in the words of Rosa Montero, "she shows us another suffocating space: the old age of the writer, to disease and deterioration".

Carmen Laforet was never forgotten in the world of literature and her work Nothing has never been out of print, but interest in her work was reborn with the publication of the epistolary I can count on you, initiative of Israel Rolón Barada, who also promoted the reissue of La mujer nueva.

In 2017, the Fundación Banco Santander published De corazón y alma (1947-1952) by Carmen Laforet and Elena Fortún, with the correspondence between the two women until the death of Fortún, the older of both. This epistolary was prefaced by (among others) Cristina and Silvia Cerezales Laforet, daughters of Carmen.

Literary production

The literary production of the writer is not very extensive. The death of his mother and the marriage of his father to another woman he did not like, a "hateful stepmother", was reflected in three of his works, which have orphans as protagonists: Nothing (1945), The Island and Its Demons (1952) and Sunstroke (1963).

Spanish literature tried to unite contradictory sentiments in each of its works. Several authors insist on her feminist vision, but she also had a mystical vision of the world, especially in her work La mujer nueva, whose central theme is the faith of the protagonist, Paulina, a woman who goes from criticize the Church for practicing the Catholic religion, a change that she herself has chosen. Paulina goes from leading a life of sin according to religion (she had a child out of wedlock and, in addition, she had another relationship with another man) to the opposite situation. In this way, the independence and freedom of women to choose her destiny and her mysticism come together in this work.Certainly he maintained religious concerns, since in the correspondence he maintained for a long time with the writer Ramón J. Sénder he affirms to believe in God. About this novel and her religious experience, she said the following:

The human fact that motivated the theme of this novel was my own conversion (in December 1951) to the Catholic faith... Faith that could be assumed to be natural to me, for I was baptized at birth, but from which I never cared again after leaving childhood, and whose practices – for me enmohecidated and meaningless – had left totally. I have escaped from this novel—precisely because I have been motivated in my experience—of every autobiographical element, apart from the sudden feeling of Grace. I have created a type of woman, protagonist of my book, totally different from my human type, and I have placed it in situations, environments and circumstances of conversion and spiritual struggle totally different from mine.

Also, intrigue and mystery are a constant in many of his works. Laforet could be considered the precursor of the detective novel in Spain, since, despite the fact that this is currently a booming genre and that it began to do so some time ago, she had done it thirty years before the rest of the authors.

In the works, aspects of the society in which he lived can also be glimpsed, especially in its beginnings, when the imposed political system was the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, a society that, especially in its beginnings, suffered serious problems, with which we could say that a moment of crisis was lived. And all this is described by Laforet in some of his works, with characters who meet foreigners visiting Spain, such as Martín, from his work Al volver la esquina (published posthumously by the Destino editorial in 2004, the same year of his death). It must be said that this latest novel is part of a trilogy entitled "Three Steps Out of Time" and also includes La insolación and Jaque mate. This is an unfinished trilogy, since, despite having discussed it in his correspondence with Ramón J. Sénder, Jaque mate has never been published. In fact, no one knows of the existence of said novel.

Works

Novels

• Nothing. (1945), Premio Nadal 1944 and Premio Fastenrath 1948.
• The island and the demons (1952).
• The new woman (1955), National Prize for Literature and Novela Minorca Award.
• Insolation (1963). First novel of trilogy Three steps out of time.
• As the corner turns (2004). Written in the 1960s, and re-elaborated practically throughout her life, was finally published the same year of her death; it is the second novel of a trilogy that begins with Insolationand that he had as the last novel "Jaque mate", which remains unprecedented.

Short novels and stories

• The dead (1952).
• The piano (1952).
• A girlfriend (1953).
• The call (1954). It includes four stories: "The Call", "The Last Summer", "A Brizgo" and "The piano".
• The displaced (1954).
• The fun journey (1954).
• The girl (1954).
• A marriage (1956).
• The girl and other stories (1970).
• "Rosamunda", in Tales of this century (Barcelona: Angels Encinar, 1995).
• «To school», in Mothers and daughters (Barcelona: Laura Freixas, 1996).
• Letter to don Juan (2007), compilation of all his short stories.
• Romeo and Juliet II (2008), compilation of her love stories.
• Seven short novels (2010), compilation of his short novels.

Others

• Gran Canaria (1961), travel guide.
• Parallel 35 (1967), travel book, reissued in 1981 with the title My first trip to USA.
• Literary articles (1977), compilation of articles.
• I can count on you (1965-1975) (2003), epistolary with Ramón J. Sender.
• Heart and soul (1947-1952) (2017), epistolary with Elena Fortun.
• Views of a woman(2021), compilation of articles published in the journal Destinationfrom 1948 to 1953.

Filmography

In 1947 the author's version of the novel Nothing was brought to the big screen. The feature film was directed by Edgar Neville and featured actors such as Conchita Montes, Rafael Bardem, María Denís and Fosco Giachetti, among others. The film ran into censorship at the time, cutting thirty minutes of it and making many of the scenes shot in Barcelona disappear.

Later, in 1956, Argentina brought another adaptation of the novel Nada to the big screen, a black and white drama directed by Leopoldo Torre Nilson.

Quotes

If one is a writer, he always writes, even if he does not want to, even if he tries to escape that doubtful glory and that real suffering he deserves to follow a vocation.

In my time of the Canary Islands my two brothers Eduardo and Juan also come in, with whom I have always felt bewildered; and later also a stepmother comes in, who, despite all my resistance to believing in fairy tales, confirmed his veracity to me, behaved like the madrastras of those stories. From her I learned that fantasy is always poor compared to reality.

It seems to me that nothing is worth running if you always have to go the same way, closed, of our personality. Some beings are born to live, others to work, and others to look at life. I had a small and ruinous role of spectator. I can't get out of it. Impossible to release me. A tremendous outline was for me the only real thing in those moments.

Who can understand the thousand threads that bind the souls of men and the reach of their words?

! How many days without importance! Unimportant days [...] weighed me like a square grey stone in the brain.

As long as I die I'll be dumped in the others. I want them and they want me. And at the same time I'll be alone

Truly, it is the world that secretly dominates life. Secretly, instinctively, the woman adapts and organizes inflexible laws, hypocritical in many situations for a terrible domain... We poor writers have never told the truth, even if we wanted to. Literature was invented by men and we continue to use the same approach to things. I would like to try a betrayal to give away some of that secret, so that little by little that force of dominance ceases to exist, and men and women understand each other better, without submitting, neither apparent nor real, to one another... it has it rains a lot for that. But, don't you agree that what is truly feminine in the human situation, we women have not said, and when we have tried it has been with borrowed language, which was false no matter how sincere we wanted to be?

Tributes

In 2010, the Carmen Laforet School was created in the Valderribas neighborhood, in the Vicálvaro district of Madrid.

In 2011 he was posthumously awarded the Gran Canaria Can de Plata Award, in the category of Arts, awarded by the Island Council of Gran Canaria.

It owns a street on the outskirts of the city of Estepona (Málaga), in the Aguas Vivas neighborhood of Guadalajara (along with other streets named after Spanish writers), another street in Majadahonda and another two in Torrejón de Ardoz and in the neighborhood of Soto del Henares (Madrid). She also named streets in the municipalities of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in the neighborhood of Lomo de Los Frailes and San Bartolomé de Tirajana, on the island of Gran Canaria, named after her.

In 2004 a series of biographies dedicated to Carmen Laforet and directed by Nuria Amat, also a writer, were published.

In 2014, the Instituto Cervantes in New York paid homage in one of its cultural activities to commemorate the seventy years since the publication of his work Nada.

There is also a square in Barcelona named after her: Plaza Carmen Laforet. And in this one, the Carmen Laforet library. At number 36 Calle Aribau there is a plaque where you can read "Va néixer en aquesta casa, font d'inspiració de la seva primera novel·la Nada", which means: "He was born in this house, the source of inspiration for his first novel Nothing".

To commemorate the centenary of his birth, Google dedicated a doodle to him on September 6, 2021.

In 2021 the portrait of Carmen Laforet will be hung at the Ateneo de Madrid. She is the second woman to hold that privilege after Emilia Pardo Bazán.

In 2022 the Cabildo de Gran Canaria named her the adoptive daughter of the island.