At the beginning of "Life Embitters" Josep Pla announces that this is the kind of thing he'd write if he had the time to write this kind of thing. Then he rambles on for 600 pages writing just that kind of thing.
"It's obviously one thing to try something," he says, "and another to succeed. I beg you: don't think I am foolish enough to confuse the two."*
*I'd like to add an asterisk to my
life & use this as an epitaph.
This book is a collection of reminiscences of Pla's peripatetic life as a Catalan journalist, traveler, and writer-at-large recast in later life as "stories." But if they are "stories" they are not stories in the conventional sense of the term. Many have no real climax, no real ending. In fact, that's what distinguishes them, makes them so much more than mere "stories." It's the quality that makes them so true to life. His narratives are more like slices of life. They all conclude with some variation of the formula, "In the end, I shrugged my shoulders and continued on my way."
Well, really, what else can you do?
Much of what Pla recounts comes from his experiences wandering about Europe between the Great Wars and living in boarding houses—the boarding house being a peculiar institution with its own distinctive species of humanity. The accounts of the eccentric characters with whom Pla comes in contact, their dramas, romances, and tragedies make up the bulk of "Life Embitters," which is not, on the whole, when all is said and done, bitter at all. If anything it's rather comic, sadly comic, perhaps, wryly observed, rueful, bittersweet, if bitter at all.
Pla is a wonderful raconteur of the cafe society sort. Playful, light, and gossipy. His interlocutors repeatedly squint at him through one eye and say, "I can never tell if you're serious or joking with me."
Pla never directly answers except to indicate it's a little of both.
There is one particularly gothic tale—a grim remembrance of a dark and brutally cold period spent in Berlin during the deflation—a tale of incipient madness, abuse, and suicide.
Irony is always Pla's shield against the embittering aspects of life and it's what keeps him safe from the cruelest of the arrows that rain down on us.
Like his boarding house companions,
Pla puts down shallow roots in this world,
ready to pull up stakes at a
moment's notice and move on.
You can't help but consider that maybe it's the wisest way to live in this world in which everything,
no matter how solid-seeming,
is temporary.
The road stretches on before us.
Every room we inhabit is only rented.
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