Degà from the European press to Paris, Juan Pedro Quiñonero is a rare bird It is difficult to understand what you have seen in the newspapers you have visited for more than 40 years. At the end of any pass he will publish some memoirs, titles From the Europe of freedoms to the Europe of the extreme right (Guillermo Escolar Editor), and in this interview he also recounts the glories and miseries of the correspondents' lives, some indiscreet phrases from Felipe González and his vision of Europe from the Parisian perspective that allows for a view from both perspectives.

There was a day, sometime in the 1970s, when Josep Pla visited the Motel Empordà, and he remained connected to it until his death. He became very close friends with Josep Mercader, the Motel's founder, and later with Jaume Subirós, Mercader's son-in-law. Upon Mercader's death, Pla asked Subirós not to change anything about the restaurant, to continue making the same dishes. His exact words were: "There are houses where the heir starts making changes, and then they collapse." He also gave him another piece of advice: "There are customers you'll have to watch out for, because they'll only come to see if it falls apart and closes; so don't change a thing."

Given the current situation, it makes perfect sense to revisit the chronicles and articles that Josep Pla wrote about Israel for Destinationwhich he later turned into the book Israel in 1957Furthermore, after the Hamas attacks of October 2023 and the war of extermination against the Palestinians waged by the Netanyahu government ever since, presenting Pla's book today is no easy task. The journalist Andreu Barnils wrote the prologue, and it has been well done: he provides historical perspective and compares past and present—before, Israel was David, he says, and now it is Goliath—; he strives to be guided by a coherent but not didactic ethical compass; he criticizes the exaggerated paternalism with which Europeans approach the Arab-Israeli conflict and judge Jews and Muslims; he combines general reflection with personal experiences...

The first book published by the writer Josep Pla, Things seen, has been reissued exactly as the author originally wrote it, and we can read one of the phrases that captured how the author heard himself when thinking about Catalan cuisine: "It's in retreat." A friend had told him the phrase, but he argued it with more lines: "It's a misfortune for us and above all a misfortune for foreigners, who never know and will never know what they have missed." Josep Pla emphasized the sadness he felt about the situation, because in ancient times, "the classic books on French cooking and gastronomy were full of Catalan recipes and dishes, which were highly celebrated and loved by all people of taste."

I write "Plan" and the computer's automatic spell checker suggests Planning. No. I get absurdly angry at the machine: I said Pla! Josep Pla. A great prose writer, journalist and essayist of the 20th century Europe that Europe will never recognize. In Catalonia itself, there are still many people who refuse to give him immense merit and genius. It's very simple: to enjoy him, you don't have to fall in love or agree, you just have to read him.

One hundred years ago, Josep Pla i Casadevall (Palafrugell, 1897 - Llofriu, 1981) decided to publish his first book, Things seen, which inaugurated the Diana publishing house. "There's no choice but to do a second printing," wrote editor Ignasi Armengou in Pla a few weeks after the volume arrived in bookstores. "We'll call it a second edition. This will have a certain effect on the public. At the rate we're going, it had sold out. arrived."

When she was working at the Palafrugell Library, Carme Fenoll (Palafolls, 1977) met the grandson of one of the Homenots by Josep Pla and a spark ignited in him. "I found it very interesting to be able to talk about the Homenots with living people who have a sentimental bond, to be able to rescue a family memory that had not been told," explains Fenoll. From that idea arose a cycle with the Josep Pla Foundation in which the grandchildren of the Homenots and experts in his work and which has now resulted in a book. Homenets (The Bell) contains seven portraits of the Homenots Seen by the grandchildren of each of them, but also by the intellectual grandchildren who have embraced the legacy and kept it alive.

"In 1925, when I went to Russia, I knew about that country about what everyone else knows: practically nothing," he said, with his usual mischievousness, Josep Pla (Palafrugell, 1897 - Llofriu, 1981). He wrote it in the text that heads the expanded and revised edition of one of his first books, Russia. News from the USSR (Diana Editions, 1925), in The North, the fifth volume of the complete works of Destino. In The North, which is preceded by two essential travel books to understand the young Josep Pla, Letters from afar and Letters from further away, that collection of chronicles for the newspaper Advertising has been transformed into Trip to Russia in 1925 and includes a long preamble written from Mas Pla, in Llofriu, at the beginning of 1967, in which the author confronts that "youthful crouch" with his mature vision: "This book is a lovingly simple outline of a construction: the walls and the squares of a wall and the facts are the doubts of whether they fall on them."