11/14/2022 0 Comments The pearl john steinbeck. 1975![]() ![]() But having recently given birth to a child, I had a whole new appreciation for exactly what that song of family is. The family you are born into is more of a given and it’s hard to know what life would feel like without that family. I could not have appreciated the song of family in the same way the first time I read this book as a teenager. It’s a gorgeous way of telling a story that works especially well for this form and I could feel the threads coming together as the baby gets sick, Kino fishes for (and finds) a great pearl, and the town reacts to their newfound wealth. I kept wanting to have the skills to create a movie from this film that was scored entirely with these songs. Steinbeck weaves other “songs” into the narrative including the (siren) song of the pearl. ![]() And although the nature of such a story is that the song must change, the interruption of a scorpion climbing down toward Coyotito’s crib is no less menacing than the introduction of the wolf in Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf.” Steinbeck calls their rhythm “the song of family” and there is no better description for it. Within the first page we see the dawning of a family’s peaceful day with the baby in a hanging box and Kino’s wife pleasantly by his side. The book then opens in a scene of Kino waking. All of this information is gorgeously wrapped up in that tiny paragraph and still it feels like literature rather than a lesson. And I knew it would have the weight of a moral. I knew the story would be filled with archetypes. This paragraph is a gorgeous piece of expectation setting. And, as with all retold tales that are in people’s hearts, there are only good and bad things and black and white things and good and evil things and no in-between anywhere. And because the story has been told so often, it has taken root in every man’s mind. ![]() They tell of Kino, the fisherman, and of his wife, Juana, and of the baby, Coyotito. In the town they tell the story of the great pearl-how it was found and how it was lost again. The prologue to The Pearl immediately set me in the fabulous or folkloric space: The book opened up for me and helped me attach language to the experience of being a new mother. I still heard that “pearl of great price” echo throughout my read, but I also learned to appreciate the book as a work of art, and I fell under the spell of the symbolism after seeing it in its natural environment and getting to experience the metaphor and message rather than have them dictated to me. So I don’t know what made me re-read the book this week, but I’m glad I did. All I can remember is my teacher going on and on about the pearl of great price-a litany that landed with such a thud in my heart that I decided never to study literature lest I come to hate books. It was the book that made me hate symbolism. The first time I read The Pearl by John Steinbeck was in junior high. ![]()
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