Josep Pla. Seeing the World in the Form of Articles by Joan Ramon Resina (review)

In the 35 years since his death, Josep Pla remains as arguably the most controversial figure of Catalan literature. In spite of being, if not the most important writer, certainly the one who captured most accurately the spirit of concrete temporal and spatial dimensions in Catalonia, Pla's literary merits have been persistently called into question. The fact that he was repeatedly denied Catalonia's highest literary award, the "Premi d'Honor de les Lletres Catalanes," might be taken as proof of how his literature was not judged exclusively by literary criteria. Today, it is widely accepted that political prejudices had a decisive impact on his exclusion from Catalan literary circles after the Spanish Civil War and significantly hindered the circulation of his work.

As it is well known, under Franco's dictatorship the Catalan language was officially suppressed in Spain. Unfortunately, this cultural genocide significantly increased the difficulty "of marketing an author without a clear national adscription" and led to Pla's disappearance from international literary circuits (xiii). This might perfectly be one of the reasons that explain why it wasn't until 2015 that one of his books—The Grey Notebook—was translated into English. Considering these factors that restrained the international dissemination of Pla's work, Stanford professor Joan Ramon Resina's new book has two dissimilar intentions and in this disparity lies the challenge of his purpose. On the one hand, the book aims to introduce Pla's oeuvre to a new audience. On the other, Resina strives to explain why, despite his international misfortune, Pla is an important writer who irrefutably could circulate beyond his culture of origin. The first goal, which might be considered necessary for the sake of literary culture, consists in making Pla's work more visible. The second one, which is certainly decisive, is the reason why Resina's Josep Pla will become central in the evolution of Pla criticism.

Beyond the fact that Resina's book is able to "break the ground and set up the critical substratum for a lasting reputation" within the Anglo-American context (xix), what we can state without any hesitation is that the author, invoking names such as Joyce, Stendhal, Simenon or Camus, expands Pla's literary resonances and facilitates his incorporation into a more hallowed literary realm.

Pla's oeuvre is so extensive and disparate—at the time of his death his collected works comprised thirty-eight volumes—that the greatest challenge in addressing his production as a whole is deciding which topics and features of his style should be the focus of analysis. The book's strategic organization—sensu lato—around the concept of memory (particularly in the outstanding last chapter), allows Resina to explore the most salient themes, and grasp the uniqueness of a man who could be considered "the most omnivorous Catalan writer to date" (261). Pla's reader-oriented prose, his political conservatism, or the indifference he showed towards modern society are just some of his defining attributes; and, as Resina shows, they can be better understood if we see his literature as a strategy against oblivion (154). In this regard, this valuable book should be seen as the first articulated attempt to read Pla's oeuvre without any particular constraint.

The volume is broken into eleven chapters. The first two are devoted to dissecting Pla's re-evaluation of literary journalism. As Resina states, his style was at the intersection of "two distinguished categories that appeared irreconcilable at the time he began to do newspaper work" (4). Pla's journalism oscillated from the very beginning between "the more lyrical essayistic journalism of the earlier twentieth century" and a more "informative-focused communicative style" (4). Taking Pla's style as a starting point, Resina is able to situate his work in historical perspective and, at the same time, using a comparatist approach, to frame him in contrast with other writers' works such as Montaigne (45), or Hemingway (23), who...