To say that Carmen Laforet’s “Nada” is both incredibly gripping and deeply unsettling would be an understatement and in my opinion is an excellent study in reciprocal trauma, the weight of a toxic environment on one’s psyche, and the ways in which one’s environment can contort them in many ways. The backdrop of the Spanish civil war serves to ground the story in a recent and vivid trauma that every Spanish citizen would have had to face to some degree or another, however it is in the dynamics of the house in the Calle de Aribau that we see how trauma can act almost as a symphony, where each instrument interacts with the others to create such bombastic furious noise that every individual instrument gets drowned out, becoming almost unintelligible amongst the sound. In this way, Andrea serves as a perfect protagonist, narrator, and narrative focal point. As she has not been in Barcelona and has not seen her family in so long, she acts as an uninitiated outsider whose life is, as of the beginning of the narrative, mostly unaffected by her extended families’ toxic dynamic. As the novel progresses, we see Andrea’s disillusionment towards her family, first feeling trapped by the rules imposed upon her by her aunt, but eventually being crushed by the weight of the household’s dysfunction. We are presented with many scenes in which Andrea, forced to witness horrible cruelty being inflicted upon her family members by each other, and while she comments on her changing perspectives of her family members, she is unable to act, to do anything that could otherwise alleviate these dismal situations. In a sense, Andrea is paralyzed in this house, and is constantly yearning for some semblance of freedom. Andrea however, is not the only family member seemingly paralyzed by their trauma, as every member of the household is presented as being crushed under the weight of their own family. Each family member hurls insults, screams, and some physical abuse towards each other and each of them refuse to take responsibility for any of their actions. As uncle Román notes to Andrea on page 26: “As for the rest of it, don’t make up any novels about it: Our arguments and shouting don’t have a cause, and they don’t lead to any conclusion”. So deep seated and long lasting is the trauma this family has endured and inflicted on one another that their dysfunction is seen as simply their primary way of life, how could it ever be otherwise? It shows that the wounds of trauma cut deep below the skin and that even if one doesn’t remember how a scar got on their skin, it had to have come from somewhere painful. And in this way, the novel’s title, “Nada”, can take on a somber meaning, referring not only to the emptiness Andrea feels being consumed by this household, but in the idea that so many of this families scars fade into nothingness, their causes unknown or unpondered, while their effects still linger. However in the end, when Andrea contemplates whether she truly got something out of her time in the Calle de Aribau, we find a short moment of contrary action, in which the contemplation of trauma, and the hope that maybe somehow some good may come from unpacking those events, cap off a bittersweet narrative in a way that one may hopefully break the cycle, albeit in a subtle way.