It feels like we're reading an entertaining novel, with a young character, in his twenties, and without a penny in his pocket, who goes around with his nose in the air and doesn't stop walking (especially, for lack of money): what has always been called a coming-of-age novel or apprenticeship novel. In reality, however, it is an ambitious chronicle, with some episodes with a lot of spice, starring this passionate pilgrim (godless) who decided to risk everything on the gamble of becoming a poet-writer. An admirer of Fyodor M. Dostoevsky and Friedrich Nietzsche, from whom he draws much inspiration, and of William Shakespeare and François Villon. Born in La Selva del Camp in 1882, an illegitimate son, repudiated by his father (which would mark him deeply), self-taught, often belittled for his lack of academic culture. Of a timid disposition (“The old timidity of the Ferreters in his blood”). That is why, despite loving books madly, the protagonist – the author himself, Puig i Ferreter, without any additions – advocates, convinced, for lived culture rather than learned culture: “This is how I have always used reality to turn it into art. Not by hunting for documents with a notepad in hand, but by taking advantage of the ‘things’ I have lived or that have deeply impressed me and have remained within me with all their colors, in that depth of human experience that, transposed by imagination and fantasy, is the vital treasure of the artist”.