the pearl, john steinbeck

beware!!! spoilers for The Pearl below!!! mostly in paragraphs 3 and 4!!!

The Pearl is a short story written in 1947 by John Steinbeck. It's described as a story where a man finds a pearl that had the potential to improve his family's life, but instead tore their life apart. I think that this is a pretty accurate summary without giving away too many details. The details are actually very important to this story and made this book worth the read, given that the premise is as simple as the summary makes it out to be. It was around 149 pages and took me 2 hours to finish.

I think the first chapter of any book is hard to get through because I always have to get used to the way the author writes, but after a few pages, the language blended in with my head and I didn't feel like I was reading a book. The prose is written in a way that made it easy to feel the feelings and nuances the characters were going through. I think this was an important part of the experience.

Halfway through, it becomes obvious that this is a story about the evil eye. The writer teases it in the first chapters with the wife's reaction to the pearl (she was also my favorite character throughout), but as the story goes on this negativity becomes more pronounced. This theme resonates with me personally. I have always feared the "music of evil" that the main character starts to fear when it becomes known to the rest of the town that they now own something valuable. He becomes paranoid and suspects people even before anything bad happens. I became aware of the term "evil eye" over a year ago, but it's something I've always considered in the back of my mind when making decisions and overthinking things. I think envy is just human nature and we should protect ourselves from it. The more I read the story, the more I thought about how this never would have happened if they had just kept quiet about the pearl. But I guess that's human nature too.

I was actually a little surprised when I read that part. When I was told that this pearl destroys their lives, I thought it would be life-destroying because they had sold it and became rich, and their old lives and simple happiness were cast away to make space for their fortune. It never occurred to me that it destroyed their lives simply because everyone found out about it. It's surprising because this is not something I would do, but I live in a different time and place. I grew up in a community where the neighborhood felt like a third place and I actually was friends with my neighbors. I imagine that the characters (especially with colonization in the backdrop) lived in this kind of community too, so it's no surprise that everyone found out. I don't think it ever occurred to them to keep it quiet, and there was never any mention of keeping it quiet in the first place that I can remember.

This was a great read.