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ungezieferwerden's review against another edition
3.0
It was a fun exercising reading this after Montaigne's Essays. Pla admittedly and unsurprisingly is an admirer of his but as to how well he read Montaigne is definitely the issue of this text. Montaigne's Essays were an autobiography by other means and stylistically the inform Pla's autojournalistic aims in filling this notebook with his observations of the world and his experiences in literary consumption.
Here Montaigne's scholasticism and analytical insight are replaced with Pla's equally powerful eye for detail and ear for dialogue. It seems if he learnt anything from Montaigne it was style and his conservatism completely missing the skepticism central to Montaigne's work. Where Montaigne seeks to know himself and actualise virtue Pla assumes virtue as in doing so his strengths become his weakness, he reveals himself as an aesthete easily seduced by surface representation. He cannot analyse the world but he can reproduce it in fine detail. An excellent trait for a petite bourgeois journalist.
Here Montaigne's scholasticism and analytical insight are replaced with Pla's equally powerful eye for detail and ear for dialogue. It seems if he learnt anything from Montaigne it was style and his conservatism completely missing the skepticism central to Montaigne's work. Where Montaigne seeks to know himself and actualise virtue Pla assumes virtue as in doing so his strengths become his weakness, he reveals himself as an aesthete easily seduced by surface representation. He cannot analyse the world but he can reproduce it in fine detail. An excellent trait for a petite bourgeois journalist.
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