ABSTRACT
La nada cotidiana, the last and also the most recent of the all works studied within the triadic framework of this chapter, shares with Arrancame la vida a post-revolutionary setting and the evocation of the female body as a vehicle for resistance. Two copies of La nada cotidiana were smuggled off the island before Valdes left in early 1995: one put on a raft leaving the island for Miami, another sent with a journalist to France, the country that would become her permanent home in exile. In terms of the Bildungsroman as generic frame here, the Revolution's investment in youth is very interesting, for it adds a layer of sociocultural specificity to Valdes's reworking of the genre. Throughout the novel Valdes has created a protagonist who narrates her own Bildung by placing the physical body en relief, and subsequently defies imposed limitations on self-expression thematically, politically and in terms of genre.
