Some Literary Cafes of the Late Nineteenth Century

A concern with the use and abuse of power, how it is exercised, by whom, and to what ends runs throughout the fiction of Catalan writer Jaume Cabré. His 1984 novel Fra Junoy o l'agonia dels sons, which was awarded the Premi Prudenci Bertrana, Crítica Serra d'Or, and Nacional de la Crítica, dramatizes the intransigence of ecclesiastical authorities in conflict with the desire for tolerance of a friar. Cabré employs different temporal and spatial planes, shifting points of view, and one of his favorite strategies, that of beginning his novels in medias res and showing the consequences of actions before narrating the actions themselves. A contrapuntal technique contrasts not just characters, but differing concepts of religion and religious life, and sets quotations from the Bible against passages from the governing documents of the convent where Fra Junoy serves as confessor. The clash between his doubts and the certitude of the convent's rigid abbess calls to mind the contest between Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn in John Patrick Shanley's Doubt: A Parable (2005).