Author: Clara Usón
- Fiction
- Seix Barral
- ISBN: 9788432225185
- Release Date: 10-14-2015
-Reviewed by: Catherine Jagoe
Clara Usón’s novel Valor is an intriguing and often gripping novel. It interweaves multiple narrators, plots and time periods to create a suspenseful, collage narrative that ultimately highlights the frailty of the human condition and the painful legacies of the past. Her characters often fail to live up to their intentions and ideals, involuntarily betraying or abandoning their loves and hopes due to entirely human, everyday flaws—small acts of cowardice, short-sightedness and collusion that can lead to awful consequences.
There are three main axes for the novel—three times and places where historical debacles occurred. They involve the botched revolutionary uprising in Jaca, Spain, in 1930, the massacres in Croatia during World War II, and the collapse of the banking system in twenty-first century Spain. The kaleidoscopic narrative shifts constantly and seamlessly between various modern-day characters such as Mati Oliván, director of a local bank, and her teenage daughter, Flor, whose lives unfold simultaneously alongside those of Fermín Galán and Luisito Duch, republican conspirators in the 1930s, and the Croatian priest Father Casimiro, who came to Spain in 1948 and who remains haunted his own complicity in the brutality and fanaticism that overtook his country and his failure to protect the young man he loved.
Usón is very good at creating suspense, and the novel speeds up at the end to arrive at a shocking, ambiguous, and tragic ending, in which our view of the stories and the speakers is suddenly turned upside down.
The idea of depicting a post-recession Spain and exploring the lives and families affected by the financial crisis has, of course, been done before, most notably by Rafael Chirbes in La orilla (On the Edge), but this novel didn’t feel in any way derivative. Like Chirbes, Usón is very good at realistic dialogue.
