«Broadening our imagination and, with it, our understanding and knowledge: this is what we must demand from literary fiction and this is what Clara Usón achieves»: this is what we read in the Spanish newspaper El País about the novel «The Beasts» (Sellerio, translated by Silvia Sichel), by the Catalan writer who has won notable prizes since her debut, including, for this book, the Dashiell Hammett Prize of the Semana Negra of Gijón for the best novel Spanish noir.
That if reality is black, or immersed in shadows, then yes, “The Beasts” is a noir, but according to Usón it draws on historical facts (especially of the twentieth century), the need to remember and generational issues, as well as a reflection on stereotypes that have become political, religious, cultural and personal dogmas. And, together with them, the reflection on violence, on the sense of guilt, on family relationships (and dramas), on the body of the individual (whether freed or enslaved) who lives in a specific social, political, “identity” context, on adolescence as a laboratory in which to begin to build one’s own future for “good” or “evil”, on the thin line between “victim” and “perpetrator”.
At the center of everything, almost always, is a female character, from which, as in “The Daughter” and “The Shy Assassin”, the writer’s investigation begins: this happens in “The Beasts”, a historical-political-documentary analysis of the years of the black war between ETA terrorism and State terrorism, through two female stories, that of the “Tigresa”, the “Tiger” Idoia, ruthless terrorist who of the toxic idea of “abertzale”, of “patriot” Basque, she has been making her exhilarating existential reason since adolescence, and that of Miren, a restless teenager since her family environment, with a policeman father of the lowest morality entangled in the Gal (the Anti-Terrorist Liberation Groups, death squads with Francoist nostalgia) and a mother who drags her daily life through lies and self-deception. With Idoia and Miren, both victims of a world of “beasts”, we tell the story of other characters, real or fictitious, often bearers of a ruinous hubris. And there is a dark murder, a common thread in Usón’s tension-filled writing that interweaves different temporal and narrative levels and through María’s narrative voice reflects on the misunderstandings of love, identity, belonging, freedom, responsibility.