• Salt Water
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Archipelago Books

Salt Water

Salt Water

by Josep Pla, translated from the Catalan by Peter Roland Bush

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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 headfirst into its mysterious 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.” Ever the authority on flavor and the brisk etiquette of sailing, eating, scheming, and smuggling, Pla is our stalwart captain through each windy, sun-soaked tale. A lifetime of reporting on current events gave Pla the necessary skills to describe the world in all its gritty, funny, invigorating detail.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781939810724
Pages: 310
Publication Date:

Praise

Pla’s stories are generally unadorned and precise in their renderings of both the people and the places of the far northeast of Spain, lives full of hardship and labor—but also their insistence on freedom. A fine introduction to a writer little known outside his native land and who memorably captures its atmosphere.
—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

Josep Pla’s dazzling collection of Hemingwayesque nonfiction essays—started during the stay-at-home orders of the “Spanish” flu outbreak of 1918—makes a striking appearance in the current moment. Its portraits and vignettes are full of the love for the close company of other people and their intrigues, from which we are as much removed now as he was then. It is as crisp in its intimacy with the stalwart souls of maritime Catalonia in the early twentieth century as a mistral wind coming down a mountain is—a wind which stops you for a few days, even a week, maybe a lifetime, to remind you of the core pleasure of gathering with other bodies in a warm room.
—Edgar Garcia

Salt Water benefits from Pla’s prolific career collecting pithy observations from sources, which helped the author generate idiosyncratic characters and iconoclastic literary insights . . . His unique prose, suffused with love, exists in a space between stoic observation and daydream.
—Colton Alstatt, Zyzzyva

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