“This love is more difficult than shitting in a jar” wrote the Argentine poet John Gelman. The verse comes to mind every time I think of the chimera of living from books. I’m not talking about writers, for what, but about booksellers, forced to invent a thousand and one for them to come up with the accounts. Part of the survival strategy consists of turning the premises into a focus of cultural sauce, with workshops, presentations and conferences that attract the Mohicans of reading, as the good bookstores in the city have been doing. In laie, of Pau Claris, for example, the journalist and writer Emily Manzano teaches the course ‘Oficis de viure’, dedicated to the intimate diaries of writers (how you miss, by the way, your book program ‘reading room’).
Rafael Chirbes, Virginia Woolf, John Cheever, Iñaki Uriarte… An excellent cycle of which I have only been able to enroll in one class, the one dedicated to the ‘Quadern gris’, by Josep Pla. What can you do, I feel a weakness for he Empordà curmudgeon, despite what he released to Montserrat Roig when she went to interview him at Llofriu’s ‘mas’, on March 4, 1972, accompanied by the editor Vergés: «Senyoreta, both these cames that tea, not cal that escrigui».
A dry and hard truth
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I barely made it to class, for a change, surprised that there were so many people—a good score or so—interested in the diary genre, more ladies than gentlemen, as usual in these meetings, all thorough readers and veterans of life. I suppose that at a certain age one settles down, the decanted prose of the days improves, which one is looking for that dry and hard truth that foams in the newspapers. The ‘Gray Quadern’ reaches her through artifice: Josep Pla rewrote its pages with an obsessive fever. Although chronologically the book covers two years, 1918 and 1919, it is immediately apparent that it is not a 21-year-old who is wielding the pen, but a man who already knows how to tie his shoes. For his poise, for his command of the word, for the freedom with which he issues his judgments, sometimes grating.
Pla is an external look, an implacable scythe. There is no exaltation of the self, nor internal speleology. But in a kind of self-portrait that invites you to write a lady named Lola S., He defines himself as dissatisfied, with an air “d’home desvagat que cerca feina i no en troba”. A wandering shadow A man capable of delimiting the beauty of the world and who, however, is devoured by restlessness. It is the tension of that spring, I suppose, that turns the ‘Gray Quadern’ into an irresistible and immortal reading.