Perla
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Perla is the story of a woman who lived through the horrors of the Holocaust and would ultimately die unable to extricate herself from its corrosive memory. It is told from the point of view of her son, who, not long after losing her, learns that he is about to become a father. These two events become the impetus for reconstructing Perla’s past and for understanding gestation, as he’s equally in the dark about what happened in his mother’s life and what is taking place in his wife’s womb. Strangely, at this time he finds himself drawn to the poets Novalis, Hölderlin, and Schlegel, and the painter Caspar David Friedrich—founders of German romanticism who strove to capture the spiritual essence of the world. With and through them, he seeks peace and grapples with the question: How could Germany produce both the purest poetry and the most complete barbarity?
Winner of France’s Goncourt Prize for a first novel, Frédéric Brun’s semiautobiographical novel considers the seemingly irreconcilable multiplicities of life—past and present, personal and collective, self and other, life and death.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Brun's inquisitive novella, a son contemplates his mother's traumatic life while preparing for fatherhood and pursuing his own aesthetic education. The unnamed narrator's mother, Perla, was a Jewish Polish migr to France and Auschwitz survivor, and her death "open new doors" for the narrator, who resolves to explore her secrets and "moments of beauty remain here on earth." The narrator imagines his mother's wartime years her deportation to Auschwitz, her encounters with Josef Mengele in scenes that are harrowing and restrained. Reeling from his mother's death and ecstatic over his arriving child, he immerses himself in German Romanticism, specifically in the bildungsroman or coming-of-age novel, looking for some key to his range of intense, contradictory feelings and to a German culture "torn between harmony and dissonance, refinement and barbarity." In these essayistic sections, the prose aims for the sublime but often seems merely inflated ("A majestic maple tree keeps vigil over my PowerBook, asking only to blossom open like a white flower") or portentous (" I' is a shadow. Literature is the portrait of shadows."). Nonetheless, there is an appealing quality to the narrator's quest to seek out truth and beauty even as he reckons with historical horror.
