Basic Black with Pearls

February 19, 2018
Celebrated in Canada as a feminist classic, Weinzweig’s (1915–2010) searing 1980 novel captures a woman’s awakening to her lover’s exploitation. A woman using the alias Lola jets from city to city, following the clues Coenraad leaves behind in copies of National Geographic to indicate the sites of their glamorous rendezvous. But when Lola arrives in Toronto—their next destination and the city she ostensibly resides in—there is no National Geographic awaiting her arrival. Desperate, she follows clues from a botany article she’s been handed by a hotel clerk instead, and these lead her on a tour of the “shabby streets of my youth.” She stumbles onto a sweatshop owned by a Holocaust survivor, a Yiddish-speaking baker, and performers rehearsing an opera. Each fanciful encounter sparks “blows of memory” that reveal the facts of her life she sought to leave behind: her marriage, her Jewish heritage, the poverty of her upbringing. Her long-delayed acknowledgment that “Coenraad was not coming” drives Lola to seek out her abandoned home and confront the woman who replaced her in her former life. Though the ending may be a let-down to some, Weinzweig’s prose style is sharp, particularly her dialogue: strange and surprising, it knocks every character interaction askew.