Jaune Cabré

We are in Spain in 1799. Don Rafel is the powerful chancellor of the Royal Tribunal of Barcelona. The author succinctly describes him as a man > whose life was marked by an unrelenting craving and the restlessness of dissatisfaction, which drove him to dream without being a poet, to fall in love without being a Don Juan, to climb ever higher above others, hoping to attain happiness. Yet, because he was intelligent, he knew how to hold the ground he had won, even at the cost of the hatred and envy of others . His skill and unscrupulousness had allowed him to climb the social ladder to an unimaginable standing—non-aristocrat that he was—and to amass considerable wealth. Powerful and feared, he seemed unassailable and insisted on being addressed as His Lordship, the prelude to a barony. A seemingly marginal incident—the murder of a singer—drags him into the abyss. The woman was murdered after a romantic liaison with a young poet, Andreu, who is accused of the crime. At the young man’s home, a document is found revealing that Don Rafel murdered his own mistress. The powerful chancellor ensures that the youth, though innocent, is swiftly convicted and sent to his execution. Yet the situation rapidly unravels: others are aware of Don Rafel’s crime, and they either blackmail him or seek revenge for the young man’s death. Don Rafel feels no remorse, but he dreads scandal and “wondered when they would begin to pounce on him to strip him of everything.” Overcome with despair, he goes to confession, only to reveal the full extent of his cynicism before the priest: when urged to surrender to the authorities, he candidly declares that > the law is a collection of arbitrariness gathered into a Code, and justice is by definition unjust . Not even God can welcome him, and at that point nothing is left for him but suicide. The society portrayed in the book is decadent: a lust for money and power, abuses and violence against the weak, a life built on appearances and sordid sexual affairs. It sounds just like modern-day Italy!! Even authentic relationships are destroyed in a corrupt society, helping to create predestined victims: Teresa’s love for Andreu led her to give him the medallion that will serve as the evidence for his conviction; the letters from Nando—naive and full of affection for Andreu, written far from Barcelona and oblivious to his friend’s fate—become cruel and insipid in light of the condemned youth's plight. The prose is pleasant, but the story unfolds slowly, circling around the figure of Don Rafel without ever investigating him deeply enough—so much so that the drama of the conclusion feels both predictable and abrupt, as if rushing to wrap up an overly protracted tale. Why not read it? It has the length of a thriller without being one.