Basic Black With Pearls
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- 9,99 €
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- 9,99 €
Publisher Description
A brilliant, lost feminist classic that is equal parts domestic drama and international intrigue.
Shirley and Coenraad’s affair has been going on for decades, but her longing for him is as desperate as ever. She is a Toronto housewife; he works for an international organization known only as the Agency. Their rendezvous take place in Tangier, in Hong Kong, in Rome and are arranged by an intricate code based on notes slipped into issues of National Geographic. He recognizes her by her costume: a respectable black dress and string of pearls; his appearance, however, is changeable. But something has happened, the code has been discovered, and Coenraad sends Shirley (who prefers to be known as “Lola Montez”) to Toronto, the last place she wants to go. There the trail leads her through the sites of her impoverished immigrant childhood and sends her, finally, to her own house, where she discards her pearls and trades in her basic black for a dress of vibrant multicolored silk.
Helen Weinzweig published her first novel when she was fifty-eight. Basic Black with Pearls, her second, won the Toronto Book Award and has since come to be recognized as a feminist landmark. Here Weinzweig imbues the formal inventiveness of the nouveau roman with psychological poignancy and surprising humor to tell a story of simultaneous dissolution and discovery.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Celebrated in Canada as a feminist classic, Weinzweig's (1915 2010) searing 1980 novel captures a woman's awakening to her lover's exploitation. A woman using the alias Lola jets from city to city, following the clues Coenraad leaves behind in copies of National Geographic to indicate the sites of their glamorous rendezvous. But when Lola arrives in Toronto their next destination and the city she ostensibly resides in there is no National Geographic awaiting her arrival. Desperate, she follows clues from a botany article she's been handed by a hotel clerk instead, and these lead her on a tour of the "shabby streets of my youth." She stumbles onto a sweatshop owned by a Holocaust survivor, a Yiddish-speaking baker, and performers rehearsing an opera. Each fanciful encounter sparks "blows of memory" that reveal the facts of her life she sought to leave behind: her marriage, her Jewish heritage, the poverty of her upbringing. Her long-delayed acknowledgment that "Coenraad was not coming" drives Lola to seek out her abandoned home and confront the woman who replaced her in her former life. Though the ending may be a let-down to some, Weinzweig's prose style is sharp, particularly her dialogue: strange and surprising, it knocks every character interaction askew.
