The intensity, the life without frills with its angry and blinding light. The literature of Clara Uson It gives us that discovery of the extreme as a decantation of the human. A mixture of will, decision, flight and inertia. All the contradictions push us to survive to tell them, when we end up discovering them naked with their strong, whitish, cold and morbid bodies, as if they were past death.
Faced with a writer like this, there is no choice but to assume that reading her is not going to be a passage through the lukewarmness of life. And it is tragically or magically delicious to peek into that wild side behind the parapet of what is known as fiction, despite the fact that it makes your skin crawl between paragraphs that become icy currents.
Existentialism battle with which to erect trenches in anticipation of the riot and the attack of the routines. Caves where to hide from the unbearable daily life, from the assignments given to the devil and from the temptations made unspeakable vices. Chasms where to stumble at ease until the chrism or morality that can nest inside opens. Intensity made prose.
Top 3 recommended novels by Clara Usón
The shy killer
Pivoting around the death of Sandra Mozarovski and her mythology, a multifocal plot is constructed to end up presenting a fascinating mosaic of different visualizations. The reality is complex when trying to draw a single timeline. In this is the grace of narrating any time, in the necessary effort to deconstruct everything to end up understanding it with that rabid credibility.
The shy killer is a novel set in the Spain of the Transition that tells a story based on the dark episode of the death of Sandra Mozarovski, actress of the uncover film, who supposedly committed suicide. Daughter of a Russian diplomat and related to the highest spheres, her case was never clarified and shocked Spanish society in the seventies. This dramatic episode serves the narrator to give an account of her own unbridled youth during the eighties, the complex relationship with her mother and the lives of three unexpected characters: Camus, Wittgenstein and Pavese.
The great philosophical questions resonate in a plot full of intrigue that tells us about the meaning of life, the blind hopes of youth and the story that we construct as a way of survival, through two young people convinced that the future belongs to them.
In this moving novel, Clara Usón, one of today's most prestigious literary writers, brings to a point of perfection and extraordinary creative maturity the elements present in all her work: the mixture of tragedy and comedy, of irony and tenderness. , the documentation of a true story intertwined with pure fiction, and an erudite and impeccable writing with a light-hearted tone and a very agile pace.
The daughter of the East
The writer Clara Usón always finds characters like satellites of a time, capable of arousing unusual curiosity around her never fully unraveled wake. Because history is peppered with second-line protagonists with intrahistories even more notorious than the most famous faint-hearted inhabitants of the artificial.
Beautiful, intelligent, outgoing, Ana has a great future ahead of her. She is the best student of her medical class in Belgrade and the pride of her father, General Ratko Mladic, whom she adores. One night, returning from a final year trip to Moscow and at only 23 years old, Ana Mladic takes her father's favorite pistol and makes a decision that will mark the life of her family forever.
What happened in Moscow? Did Ana see the other side of her father, for her a hero, for many a war criminal? The tragedy of Ana Mladic confers a familiar, real and close dimension to the terrible drama of the Balkan war, the last European war and the background of this absorbing novel.
The daughter of the East is nourished by truthful data, intertwined with rumors and conjectures, a hybrid of reality and fiction with a wide gallery of characters such as Slobodan Miloševic and Radovan Karadžic, in which Clara Usón combines different narrative voices and combines rigorous research with popular culture to reflect on extreme nationalism and political manipulation. With deep wisdom, The daughter of the East it weaves the tradition of the epic with recent history and shows us that in certain circumstances the decision not to take sides is, perhaps, the one that compromises the most.
Market
Characters with little in common who end up living in the same settings as the other protagonists who inhabit these stories. Sensations of encounter between profiles thousands of light years from each other. The magical sensation of a fine silver thread that weaves together everything, plot and even life.
A branch manager of a Levantine bank that has sold preferentials. A young military man, FermÃn Galán, who decides to put his republican ideals into practice and lead the revolution in Jaca in 1930. A fanatical priest in the Jasenovac concentration camp, in the Independent State of Croatia, during the Second World War. All of them face situations in which they must take a risk, put their courage to the test, for the sake of what for them is the supreme value: revolution, faith, money, before which conscience is only a weak barrier.
Market delves into the wounds of the past and the greatest fracture of contemporary man. Times, spaces and characters intertwine before the astonishment of the reader, configuring a novel in which, ultimately, the essence of great novels is addressed: the complexity of human nature and its contradictions.
The skill with which Clara Usón keeps you in suspense until the end is surprising and emotional. A purebred writer, she has a narrative pulse capable of harboring depth and a timely sense of humor; a different look internationally recognized as one of the most interesting voices in current European narrative.
