L'escanya-Pobres

In the backwater town of Pratbell, a former muleteer named Olaguer suddenly opens a grain warehouse, and the whispers begin. Where did a poor man get such wealth? The townspeople watch his every move with a mixture of jealousy and suspicion, convinced he must be involved in something illicit. But Olaguer cares nothing for their opinion. While they brand him a miser and a paragon of avarice, he toils alone in his granary, accumulating more and more, driven by a compulsion none can understand. Set in a rural Catalonia on the verge of industrialization, this fierce 1884 novel dissects the thin membrane between honest labor and obsessive greed, between village suspicion and the loneliness of climbing above one's station. Oller, a pioneer of Catalan realism, paints a devastating portrait of a man who achieves everything and loses everyone, in a society that both covets wealth and punishes those who possess it.