Why You Should Read "El rellotger de Creixells"
I can’t read Catalan. Has it been translated?
No. So you’d better start learning.
What’s about?
It’s Josep Pla’s investigation into a legendary bandit from the Empordà region who operated during the Third Carlist War in the 1870s. The guy was called the Watchmaker of Creixells, and he was eventually garroted after being convicted of eighteen murders plus countless robberies.
So it’s basically true crime?
On the surface, yes. But Pla transforms it into something else entirely. He’s travels around Empordà, talking to old people who remember what their grandparents told them, sifting through fragmented accounts and official records. The methodology is superficially journalistic, but the sensibility is literary eben as he pretends it isn’t.
It’s myth, memory, documentary, and meditation on the effects of war, really a lot of things.
Remember Pla’s whole shtick/poetic is, “Hey, I am just a Catalan guy who wanders about and writes down what he sees. Literature, my arse!” His first collection of writing was titled “Things Seen”.
It must be long.
No, that’s part of why it’s great. It’s just over a hundred pages. He doesn’t shout at you; it’s all there, but you have to read carefully to get it. He hopes for patient readers, patient not because it’s hard to read, it isn’t, but patient for the sense to come beating through.
There’s no moralising or psychologising. He presents the Watchmaker neither as a romantic outlaw nor as a monster, a figure we never quite grasp.
What exactly was going on at the time?
The Carlist Wars were brutal. The whole region was convulsed with violence, poverty, and social breakdown. Pla gives you all that context without using it as an excuse. The eighteen murders remain murders. The terror this guy inspired was real and documented. But you can’t understand him without understanding the chaos he emerged from.
We might also think of Pla’s grim reflections on the costs and consequences of The Third Carlist War as reflecting his views on those of the Spanish Civil War, most of which he spent outside the country and working in support of the rebels.
What’s his writing like?
It’s Pla, so yes, it’s extraordinary but in a way that’s very hard to describe. It looks simple, but you try writing like that; almost an anti-literature literature. If you like “fine writing” with rich metaphors and luscious adjectives, Pla is not your man. If you read and think carefully, you’ll get it.
There’s also an element of documentary intent in the apparent simplicity of the prose. He wanted to write down something of the culture, language and landscape of Empordà.
He’s a great writer in Catalan, probably the greatest of the twentieth century but he wasn’t really a Catalan writer. When he talked about “my country” he really meant Empordà and the Catalan language, not Catalonia as a whole
What kind of reader would love this?
Anyone interested in how literature engages with history. Anyone who loves precise, unsentimental prose. Anyone fascinated by the gap between what actually happened and how we remember what happened. And, anyone who wants to understand why Pla matters, not just as an anti-style stylist, but as a cultural historian of extraordinary sensitivity. And why he was a great artist.
Does the book have a resolution?
Not really. The Watchmaker was executed but we know that from the start Who he really was, what drove him, how much of what people remember is accurate, all of that remains partially obscured by time and the unreliability of memory.
And Pla is completely comfortable with that ambiguity.
So why isn’t Pla huge? Why have I never heard of him?
He wrote in a minority language in the shadow of a giant one. He sided with the bad guys in the Civil War. His literature to the casual observer isn’t very literary. Take your pick.
Final verdict?
It’s a masterpiece of a very special kind. Buried in Pla’s enormous body of work (47 volumes!) and easy to miss, but it’s one of the essentials. It shows what only literature can do; it’s about particular events in Empordà, but really it’s about history, memory, and war everywhere and always.