Basic Black With PearlsA 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. |
Contents
Section 1 | 1 |
Section 2 | 3 |
Section 3 | 8 |
Section 4 | 9 |
Section 5 | 12 |
Section 6 | 14 |
Section 7 | 18 |
Section 8 | 26 |
Section 13 | 95 |
Section 14 | 96 |
Section 15 | 97 |
Section 16 | 105 |
Section 17 | 119 |
Section 18 | 120 |
Section 19 | 125 |
Section 20 | 145 |
Section 9 | 37 |
Section 10 | 50 |
Section 11 | 61 |
Section 12 | 84 |
Section 21 | 149 |
Section 22 | 160 |
Section 23 | 161 |
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Common terms and phrases
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