Clara Usón: El asesino timido (The Shy Assassin)
Our narrator is perhaps not surprisingly called Clara Usón. She tells us When we’re young, we’re not afraid of death, ,we don’t fret about it. dying strikes the young as a fate so far removed it can’t hurt them, only the wan, docile husks—so like the parents they loathe—that time will have turned them . Yes, this book is about death/suicide but it is about a lot of other things including love, sex, pornography, the death of Franco and much more.
Clara frequently falls in love when she is young and has a series of affairs, clearly all of which are imaginary. (Francoist education made it impossible for me to imagine sex). She also reads a lot of romantic novels, preferring those where the poor young heroine meets and marries a rich powerful man, but it turns out that, unknown to her, she was actually a queen.
The book opens up at the end of the Franco era. He is dying, and indeed will shortly die. Things start changing before his death and, to our surprise, of all of the things that do change there is is a more open attitude to pornography. We spent the mid-seventies gaping in awe as our country attained the dubious freedom of a national cinema starring girls who, without fail, opened or removed their tops within seconds of appearing onscreen. . Previously Spanish men had headed to France to watch pornographic films gbut radually they seem to become acceptable in Spain, though of course only female nudity is allowed, not male nudity. One of the many young women get into Spanish pornographic cinema is Sandra Mozarowsky . Surprisingly enough, she is the daughter of a diplomat though her parents seemed to be more or less tolerate her career. Despite the films she was making, and they include some quite violent pornography, of which we get a certain amount of description, Sandra says all I’m saying is that I’m a virgin, but only because I haven’t found the right guy yet.
We know that Sandra had a successful career as a star in various porn films, including some which were quite violent, and. We know how she died. She fell off a the second floor roof garden of the building where she lived with her parents, nominally committing suicide though there is absolutely no evidence that she wanted to kill herself. As we shall see there is an alternative view about how and why she died.
Before we get there, Clara ruminates on death and suicide and plunges into existentialism, quoting liberally from Camus and Kierkegaard.
Of course we learn about Sandra’s somewhat murky and not always successful love life. There were, of course certain rules about what a man could do and what a woman would allow.
However. initially much of the focus is on Sandra. She has a pragmatic view of death. Do you worry about death?”
“Not yet, luckily. I’ve never experienced it, so I don’t know whether we should worry about it or not. I’m a realist, anyway. You’re born, you get old, and then you die. We learn a lot about her film career, including summaries of some of the films she was in, starting with one nominally set in England but clearly filmed in Madrid and Toledo.
Before we get into Sandra’s alleged romance with the king, we learn that Clara actually met him or, rather, he bumped into her coming out of a shop and did not apologise. Clara came from a family of royalists and her mother and her family were particularly keen on the monarchy.
She tells us quite a bit about the king, how he replaced his father as the heir apparent and how he kowtowed to Farnco over the years to make sure he did become king. But we also learn a bit about his dark side such as his alleged.(accidental) killing of his elder brother as well, of course, he is a frequent philandering with women found for him by his courtiers. One of these women, of course, may have included Sandra andUsón imagines their relationship. For example, what did she call him, particularly when they were in bed together?
We have already seenCamus and Kierkegaard. We now move on to Ludwig Wittgenstein.
She finds a certain comparison between her family and the Ludwig Wittgenstein family, though the connection is somewhat limited. She is also interested to note that it seems that all three of his brothers killed themselves and of course suicide is a key theme of this book. We follow the philosopher from his birth to his successful career as a philosopher. We learn various interesting facts such as that his father was very rich, and now being the oldest surviving male he inherits it all. But we also learn that why he may have been a great philosopher he was something of a flawed human being. However, his final words wereTell them I’ve had a wonderful life. very similar to the final words of Clara’s mother.
Isn’t this book about?Sandra Mozarowsky? Well,yes. Which was the real Sandra? A serious, careful artist on the rise, or a hot little cocktail waitress? A young innocent or a young whore?
Sadly, interest in Sandra seems to be as much in her death as her life. There is a more or less official account of how she died but, various books, articles and websites have given alternative views. In this book.Usón completely demolishes the official account as being totally illogical and improbable. Of course we will never know the truth.
Finally, our author imagine a biopic about herself and she comments that there is only one person that could play her. It is of course Sandra. So we get a rough script for this biopic which seems to involve the extensive use of recreational drugs and the subsequent rehab.
As you can see, this book covers variety of topics: suicide and death, various philosophers, the life and possible death of a porn star, Spain as it emerges from Franco, the king of Spain and his behaviour and possible misbehaviour as well as the author’s own story. I thoroughly enjoyed this book as I do enjoy a book which goes off on tangents some of which join up and some of which do not and which discusses a host of ideas, brings in real people and deals with both fictitious and a real life. In short I can thoroughly recommend this book..
Publishing history
First published in 2018 byEditorial Planeta
First English translation in 2026 by Vanderbilt University Press
Translated by Lily Meyer