John Steinbeck - The Pearl

 

The Pearl is my first John Steinbeck book, chosen purely for its brevity since I needed a palate cleanser. Steinbeck is useful for that - I have 2 more of his books - The Red Pony and Tortilla Flat - and they are just as short.

The Pearl is such a beautiful story, a familiar fable of the corrupting power of wealth, but set among the fisherfolk of Baja California, Mexico. There are corn cakes, red beans, and pulque. There are scorpions. There's a baby called Coyotito. Poverty has never been so gorgeous. Alas, it left me cold, as most traditional myths and legends do. They feel like canned food.

Read it, though, if only because it's only 87 pages long. Here's my favourite passage.

The essence of pearl was mixed with essence of men and a curious dark residue was precipitated. Every man suddenly became related to Kino's pearl, and Kino's pearl went into the dreams, the speculations, the schemes, the plans, the futures, the wishes, the needs, the lusts, the hungers, of everyone, and only person stood in the way and that was Kino, so that he became curiously every man's enemy. The news stirred up something infinitely black and evil in the town; the black distillate was like the scorpion, or like hunger in the smell of food, or like loneliness when love is withheld, The poison sacs of the town began to manufacture venom, and the town swelled and puffed with the pressure of it.