The Pearl by John Steinbeck
When I started this month my goal was to show how classics are building blocks of storytelling. The Pearl, Stienbeck's 90 page novella, is just such a story. First, some background. This book is based on a Mexican folktale called The Legend of Mechudo. Seems familiar doesn't it? Nearly every culture has examples of this story. Change the place, setting, and desired object and it turns into an Irish, German, or Japanese story. The ending is the same, the moral stays relevant, and we all walk away learning something. Think of stories like The Pearl as the original classroom. Passed down verbally for generations, children learned moral lessons from their outcomes. It set up the structure of a community, and made society possible. I'm not vastly overstating this. Walk in the DVD section of Best Buy in the next few weeks. They are impossible to miss. Is that a shaking of the head I'm detecting? Fine. Rent Final Destination and try not to spot the urban legends in it. We are still taught using this method, we've just made it slightly fancier with CGI.
After this quick read, I was able to see how Stienbeck's work has inspired others. His use of language drew distinct and direct parallels to Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Stienbeck may have been more overt with his story telling, meaning it's difficult to miss the plot, Márquez is slightly more subtle. It's a deconstruction of reality, magical realism, that exists in his storytelling. Márquez takes elements of Stienbeck's story telling and breaks them apart. He leaves them strewn in the pages. A character like el Mechudo exists, but he's often the butt of a joke, or dies a whimsical death. Where Stienbeck stopped Márquez continued often times creating a beautiful reality out of horrific conditions.
My next book is The Wind in the Willows. Also, my post for Little Women is saved and ready to go, but I'm waiting on a friend to do a write up for a cross post. That should be some time at the end of this week or the start of next.
When I started this month my goal was to show how classics are building blocks of storytelling. The Pearl, Stienbeck's 90 page novella, is just such a story. First, some background. This book is based on a Mexican folktale called The Legend of Mechudo. Seems familiar doesn't it? Nearly every culture has examples of this story. Change the place, setting, and desired object and it turns into an Irish, German, or Japanese story. The ending is the same, the moral stays relevant, and we all walk away learning something. Think of stories like The Pearl as the original classroom. Passed down verbally for generations, children learned moral lessons from their outcomes. It set up the structure of a community, and made society possible. I'm not vastly overstating this. Walk in the DVD section of Best Buy in the next few weeks. They are impossible to miss. Is that a shaking of the head I'm detecting? Fine. Rent Final Destination and try not to spot the urban legends in it. We are still taught using this method, we've just made it slightly fancier with CGI.
After this quick read, I was able to see how Stienbeck's work has inspired others. His use of language drew distinct and direct parallels to Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Stienbeck may have been more overt with his story telling, meaning it's difficult to miss the plot, Márquez is slightly more subtle. It's a deconstruction of reality, magical realism, that exists in his storytelling. Márquez takes elements of Stienbeck's story telling and breaks them apart. He leaves them strewn in the pages. A character like el Mechudo exists, but he's often the butt of a joke, or dies a whimsical death. Where Stienbeck stopped Márquez continued often times creating a beautiful reality out of horrific conditions.
My next book is The Wind in the Willows. Also, my post for Little Women is saved and ready to go, but I'm waiting on a friend to do a write up for a cross post. That should be some time at the end of this week or the start of next.
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