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Padura’s novel El hombre que amaba a los perros (The Man Who Loved Dogs) deals with the murder of Leon Trotsky and the man who assassinated him, Ramon Mercader. At almost 600 pages, it is his most accomplished work and the result of more than five years of meticulous historical research. The novel, published in September 2009, attracted a lot of publicity mainly because of its political theme. The novel centres ‘on Stalin’s murderous obsession with Leon Trotsky, an intellectual architect of the Russian Revolution and the founder of the Red Army’, and considers ‘how revolutionary utopias devolve into totalitarian dystopias.’

Pla had to live under censorship for much of his life: first during Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship, later in Italy and Germany (where he worked as a correspondent during the rise of the Falange), and during Francisco Franco’s long rule. Although he initially sympathized with the dictatorship (he wrote in 1940 that it was “in the general interest”), his support only lasted a few months. He soon began to show skepticism, especially as it became impossible to publish in Catalan. Although he always maintained a moderate political stance that allowed him to publish, he was deeply uncomfortable with Franco’s tireless censorship (he wrote in one of his diaries that it was “the worst that [I] have known”, carried out by “servants of fanaticism”). He hated the regime’s disdain for Catalan language and culture and its stubborn inability to turn itself into a democracy, not even a tutelary one.

The most important characteristics of the “Planian” literary style are simplicity, irony, and clarity. Extremely modest and sensitive to ridicule, he detested artifice and empty rhetoric. Throughout his literary life, he remained faithful to his own style: “the necessity of a clear, precise, and restrained writing” and his lack of interest in literary fiction, cultivating a dry style, apparently simple, practical, and devoted to that which is real. He was an acute observer of reality in its smallest details and he gave a faithful testimony of the society of his time.

His works show a subjective and colloquial vision, anti-literary, in which he stresses, nevertheless, an enormous stylistic effort by calling things by their names and “coming up with the precise adjective”, one of his most persistent literary obsessions. An untiring writer, from his viewpoint life is chaotic, irrational, and unjust, while the longing for equality and revolutions are a delusion that incites worse wrongs than those that it tries to put a stop to. Conservative and rational, he was not inclined to action, but voluptuousness and sensuality: the pleasure of putting the world down on paper. A good conservative, he ate well and drank better (as an old man, whisky made up a good part of his diet), an inveterate smoker, he wore a bowler hat from his youth and later was inseparable from his country beret. He hated banality, cultural affectations (he never included quotations in his works, despite being a reader of the classics) and “people who talk just to hear themselves.” So he wrote: “It is more difficult to write than to think, much more difficult: so everyone thinks”.

Pla lived a life completely dedicated to writing. The extent of his Obres Completes (Complete Works, 46 volumes and nearly 30,000 pages), which is a collection of all his journals, reports, articles, essays, biographies, novels, and some poems gives an idea of its daunting work schedule while complicating its chronological classification. Many of these pages are the fruit of a hard process of rewriting texts from his youth and weekly articles that were published in Destino for nearly 40 years, as well as hundreds of articles published in different newspapers and an abundance of correspondences.

Thematic classification is not easy either, as many articles appeared in different locations with some changes, his thematic repertoire is extensive and, above all, the boundaries between the genres that he developed are not always clear.

| WIKIPEDIA |