It is an important moment for any national literature when writers begin to feel free to write about other countries. And not as a veiled way to say something about their own country, mind you, but simply because they feel like it. Spain has now finally entered into the era of global relevance, and Clara Usón’s new novel La hija del Este is part of this welcome phenomenon. (I think this book is highly likely to be translated into English, although it has been published too recently for such a translation to exist just yet. So do stay on the lookout, the book is very good.)
Usón writes about the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s and the wars that ensued as a result. The novel is very powerful and beautifully constructed, and the writer never gives in to temptation to use Yugoslavia to say something about Spain.
The novel begins with the protagonist’s short stay in the Moscow of 1994. I happened to be in Moscow exactly at the time the writer is describing and I can say that her descriptions of the city in that exciting and turbulent era are very good and reliable. This is extremely rare because Western writers usually write total crap on the subject. Usón doesn’t manage to transmit the excitement of those times but this is only the result of her need to set a somber tone for the rest of the novel.
La hija del Este was of enormous interest to me because it discusses the events of the Serbo-Bosnian war from the point of view of Serbs as the aggressors and Bosnians as victims. This is not the approach I was exposed to when the war was taking place. (You remember where I lived in the 1990s, right?) The narrative of the war that was known to me was that of our Slav brothers and sisters being attacked and persecuted by the horrible, mean Bosnians who were acting at the behest of the vile, imperialistic Americans. The word “Muslims” was barely ever mentioned in that narrative. I vaguely knew that there were some Muslims somewhere on the margins of this conflict, but I didn’t know they were central to the war. Our journalists and politicians kept referring to the region as Yugoslavia long after there was no more Yugoslavia. It is interesting that I’m now discovering a different perspective of the war from a Spanish writer.
I realize that this blog’s readers have probably been exposed to the version of events that Clara Usón is presenting in this novel and it will not shock them in the way it shocked me. However, the novel is still highly valuable even for those who already know this perspective.
At this point, I’m not ready to draw any conclusions about the Bosnian War but I’m glad I discovered that a different approach exists from this valuable novel.
And what do you know about the wars in former Yugoslavia?
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