Josep Pla

Barcelona as seen through the eyes of the finest Catalan prose writer of the last century.

Josep Pla moved to Barcelona to study at the university, during a period that coincided with the First World War. Penniless, the young student spent his spare time looking for work and wandering the streets of a city he would get to know in detail, observing everything with the discerning, sceptical gaze of an outsider. The Spanish flu pandemic drove him back home, in what would be the beginning of his masterpiece, The Grey Notebook.

Barcelona, an Engaging Discussion was written in the 1950s when the author was in his prime. Not only does it recount the memories of his youth, as melancholic as they are ironic, but it also discusses – with his characteristic wit – the history of Barcelona itself, the changing fortunes of its rapid transformations and the deeper connotations of a capital city that, with all its lights and shadows, embodies the contradictions of Catalan identity.

“Josep Pla was a great noticer of things and places; his gaze was alert and dry; he wrote in a style which registered both the smallest detail and the large picture. His relationship to Catalan identity and Spanish history was complex, often ambiguous. His relationship, however, to the scene in front of him, or the days in which he lived, remains fascinating for its clarity, its sharpness, its originality and its wit. On display in his work is a glittering and sparkling sensibility.” Colm Toíbin

“The grand old man of Catalan letters and one of Spain’s most prolific writers.” Chicago Tribune