Salt Water - Josep Pla

Salt Water

By: Josep Pla

Paperback | 1 December 2020

At a Glance

Paperback


$40.25

or 4 interest-free payments of $10.06 with

 or 

Aims to ship in 15 to 25 business days


Peter Bush, winner of the Ramon Llull Prize for Literary Translation, brings to English this most prolific and influential of Catalan writers.

Dripping with a panache that can turn in a comic instant to the most conciliatory humility, Josep Pla's foray into the land and sea most familiar to him will plunge readers head-first into its mysterious (and often tasty!) depths. Here are adventures and shipwrecks, raspy storytellers and the fishy meals that sustain them.

After describing the process of beating an octopus with branches to soften up its flesh, Pla writes, "These are dishes that must be seen as a last resort." Pla inflects the mundane with the hidden rhythms of power sculpting culture, so that a hot supper is never just food—it embodies economic precarity and environmental erosion along with its own peculiar flavor.

A lifetime of reporting on current events gave Pla the necessary skills to describe the world in all its gritty, funny, invigorating detail.

About the Author

Pla (1897-1981) was a Catalan writer and journalist who lived in Spain, France, Italy, England, Germany, and Russia. He was awarded The Gold Medal of the Autonomous Government of Catalonia for his contribution to Catalan literature. His complete works are published in thirty-eight volumes
Industry Reviews
"The grand old man of Catalan letters and one of Spain's most prolific writers."
Chicago Tribune

"Josep Pla has long been considered one of the finest writers of autobiographical texts in any of the languages of Spain."
Hispanic Review

"Considered one of the most influential Catalan authors of the twentieth century, [Pla] was born and raised in the Emporda, and over the course of his life wrote over 30,000 pages of prose in which he diligently catalogued the landscape and the life and habits of the people of the region. His complete works, published and republished over the years, contain marvelous descriptive passages that capture the landscape's history and its complex topography at once."
Words Without Borders

"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 Toibin

More in Spanish Civil War

Homage to Catalonia - George Orwell

RRP $22.99

$22.90

Acts of Love and War - Maggie Brookes

RRP $32.99

$30.25

A People's History of Catalonia : People's History - Michael Eaude
A People's History of Catalonia : People's History - Michael Eaude

RRP $209.00

$175.75

16%
OFF
Warships in the Spanish Civil War : New Vanguard - Angus Konstam
Guernica : Painting the End of the World - James Attlee
Lord of All the Dead - Javier Cercas

$33.50

The Last Days of The Spanish Republic - Paul Preston