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3.8 AVERAGE
3.8 AVERAGE
Not a journal per se, but more of a year and a half long literary exercise in which Pla is attempting to alter his prose style from a flourishing (or as Pla calls it, his noucentista) style to something more natural. To write as one speaks, as his buddy Plana describes it.
The observations tend to focus on literary topics and figures of the day (1919), but the highlights of the book are Pla's wonderful descriptions of Palafrugell and the neighboring villages of his hometown. Pla's observations are direct and often served with a side of dry witticism. There are long lulls at times, which is why I didn't give this thing a higher rating, but those lulls are not the reason it took me three weeks to read it. 'The Gray Notebook' just lends itself to being read piecemeal. I enjoyed reading it slowly and in short intervals. I recommend a similar approach for future readers.
Take the rating with a grain of salt. I think excellent is a fair description and there is something for everyone in here.
The observations tend to focus on literary topics and figures of the day (1919), but the highlights of the book are Pla's wonderful descriptions of Palafrugell and the neighboring villages of his hometown. Pla's observations are direct and often served with a side of dry witticism. There are long lulls at times, which is why I didn't give this thing a higher rating, but those lulls are not the reason it took me three weeks to read it. 'The Gray Notebook' just lends itself to being read piecemeal. I enjoyed reading it slowly and in short intervals. I recommend a similar approach for future readers.
Take the rating with a grain of salt. I think excellent is a fair description and there is something for everyone in here.
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.