Product Description

THE PEARL is Steinbeck's flawless parable about wealth and the evil it can bring. When Kino, an Indian pearl-diver, finds 'the Pearl of the world' he believes that his life will be magically transformed. He will marry Juana in church and their little boy, Coyotito, will be able to attend school. Obsessed by his dreams, Kino is blind to the greed, fear and even violence the pearl arouses in him and his neighbours. Written with haunting simplicty and lyrical simplicity, THE PEARL sets the values of the civilized world against those of the primitive and finds them tragically inadequate.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #109140 in Books
• Published on: 2000-09-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

From the Back Cover
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About the Author
Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck is remembered as one of the greatest and best-loved American writers of the twentieth century. His complete works will be available in Penguin Modern Classics.

Customer Reviews

Finding the Real Treasure
Most people born and raised in developed first world countries cannot even imagine the depths of poverty that most of the rest of the world are forced to live with. This story illuminates this fact, as we enter the world of Kino, a pearl diver and occasional fisherman, his wife Juana, and their baby son, Coyotito. All they have is a grass shack house, a few clay cooking utensils, and their prize possession, Kino's boat, inherited from his father and grandfather. The boat is the family's livelihood, providing the means to put a meal on the table and to provide a few pesos for store bought goods by selling the small pearls Kino is able to find.

But Kino and his family, far from being depressed or unhappy, have a great treasure, the love they have for each other and their satisfaction with life as it is, with few disturbing dreams of greater things. But their quiet, routine life is turned upside down the day that Kino finds a Great Pearl. Suddenly Kino can dream of better things: a rifle for himself, school for his son so he will be able to read and tell what is really in the books, a real house. But dreams can be deadly things. Dreams lead to desire, and desire to greed, and greed to violence.

What happens to Kino and family from this point on is not a pretty story. Now we see that underneath the quiet, idyllic seeming small town and its inhabitants lie the seeds of cheating, betrayal, collusion, fear, and murder. And we see the gradual loss of Kino's real treasures. By the end of the book, events have reached the level of real tragedy, and you, along with Kino, are liable to end up in a state of emotional exhaustion.

Steinbeck's prose for this book matches his characters and situation very well, a very minimalist sentence structure and set of speech patterns. As a parable, the story has a strong moralistic point, but Steinbeck does not overdrive his thematic message, but lets his story speak for itself. One of Steinbeck's great strengths was his ability to capture on paper the characters he saw around him, and this book is a showcase for that talent. The characters of Kino and Juana are exquisitely drawn, real people you can relate to even though their lifestyles may be very far from your own. And because they are real people, it is very hard not to get drawn into their lives, where their dreams and their pains very readily become your own.

This may not be Steinbeck's greatest book, as it is too short and with too limited a focus to compare to something like his Grapes of Wrath. But within its own territory, there are very few other pieces of literature that are even half as good.

A simple and beatiful story with much more behind it...
This was one of the most amazing books I've read. At a first glimpse it looks a very simple, easy reading book. And it is very easy to read, but behind the story is a whole philosophy of life, an anti-materialistic, a though critic of the capitalist society, along with the love for the homeland which is always present in Steinbeck's books. This is also an excellent book to give to those people who don't usually read because they find it boring. I tried doing it and I was successful ;)

The story is beatiful and simple. The philosophy is beautiful. What more can we for?

Pearl of Wisdom
This story is about how we are all prisoners of circumstance, and how what seems like the chance to escape the misery of our lives can be but an illusion. It shows how something which in an ideal world should be a great blessing can in fact become a curse. Such is the discovery of the `Pearl of the World' for Kino and his family.
The darker side of human nature is very much paramount in this story, revealing to what depths people will go for the sake of their own financial gain. Steinbeck uses the story of the pearl to illustrate how difficult it can be to change the course of our lives, and how if we try to break out of the unwritten consensus which governs our daily lives, things can not only become lonely but also dangerous, as Kino discovers to his great cost.
I'm not generally a fan of short stories, but this one says more about human nature than some authors can fit into 400 pages. As usual with Steinbeck, it is a very good piece of writing.