PearlPearl
Title rated 3.05 out of 5 stars, based on 7 ratings(7 ratings)
Book, 2004
Current format, Book, 2004, , Available .Book, 2004
Current format, Book, 2004, , Available . Offered in 0 more formatsReceiving a call from the State Department that her daughter Pearl has been protesting global violence by chaining herself to a flagpole at the American embassy in Dublin and refusing to eat, liberal New Yorker and single mother Maria Meyers heads to Ireland to save her daughter, while Pearl's surrogate father, Joseph Kasperman, flies in from Rome to help. 50,000 first printing.
Receiving a call from the State Department that her daughter Pearl has been protesting global violence by chaining herself to a flagpole at the American embassy in Dublin and refusing to eat, Maria Meyers heads to Ireland to save her daughter.
On Christmas night, 1998, Maria Meyers - a New York single mother with a radical past - receives a call from the State Department: her daughter, Pearl, who is studying abroad at Trinity College, Dublin, has chained herself to the flagpole outside the American embassy and has not eaten in six weeks. Pearl has written a statement saying that her hunger strike is an act of witness, marking the death of a young man in the aftermath of the contested Irish peace agreement - a death for which she feels personally responsible - and calling attention to the human will to harm. Maria, who has always congratulated herself on Pearl's impeccable liberal upbringing, must reexamine all her assumptions about Pearl as she boards a plane for Ireland, determined to prevent her daughter's death. At the same time, Joseph Kasperman, Maria's friend since childhood and Pearl's surrogate father, flies to Dublin from Rome to help.
In Pearl, Mary Gordon engages us in the lives of Maria, Joseph, and Pearl, flashing back to their complex histories: the conflicted experience with church and politics that shaped Maria in the 1960s; questions of responsibility and the nature of beauty that have shaped Joseph's understanding; the anguish of Pearl, the serious girl whose early inklings of the will to harm seem borne out in a world grown increasingly perilous.
On Christmas night of 1998, Maria Meyers learns that her twenty-year-old daughter, Pearl, has chained herself outside the American embassy in Dublin, where she intends to starve herself to death. Although Maria was once a student radical and still proudly lives by her beliefs, gentle, book-loving Pearl has never been interested in politics–nor in the Catholicism her mother rejected years before. What, then, is driving her to martyr herself?
Shaken by this mystery, Maria and her childhood friend (and Pearl’s surrogate father), Joseph Kasperman, both rush to Pearl’s side. As Mary Gordon tells the story of the bonds among them, she takes us deep into the labyrinths of maternal love, religious faith, and Ireland’s tragic history. Pearl is a grand and emotionally daring novel of ideas, told with the tension of a thriller.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Receiving a call from the State Department that her daughter Pearl has been protesting global violence by chaining herself to a flagpole at the American embassy in Dublin and refusing to eat, Maria Meyers heads to Ireland to save her daughter.
On Christmas night, 1998, Maria Meyers - a New York single mother with a radical past - receives a call from the State Department: her daughter, Pearl, who is studying abroad at Trinity College, Dublin, has chained herself to the flagpole outside the American embassy and has not eaten in six weeks. Pearl has written a statement saying that her hunger strike is an act of witness, marking the death of a young man in the aftermath of the contested Irish peace agreement - a death for which she feels personally responsible - and calling attention to the human will to harm. Maria, who has always congratulated herself on Pearl's impeccable liberal upbringing, must reexamine all her assumptions about Pearl as she boards a plane for Ireland, determined to prevent her daughter's death. At the same time, Joseph Kasperman, Maria's friend since childhood and Pearl's surrogate father, flies to Dublin from Rome to help.
In Pearl, Mary Gordon engages us in the lives of Maria, Joseph, and Pearl, flashing back to their complex histories: the conflicted experience with church and politics that shaped Maria in the 1960s; questions of responsibility and the nature of beauty that have shaped Joseph's understanding; the anguish of Pearl, the serious girl whose early inklings of the will to harm seem borne out in a world grown increasingly perilous.
On Christmas night of 1998, Maria Meyers learns that her twenty-year-old daughter, Pearl, has chained herself outside the American embassy in Dublin, where she intends to starve herself to death. Although Maria was once a student radical and still proudly lives by her beliefs, gentle, book-loving Pearl has never been interested in politics–nor in the Catholicism her mother rejected years before. What, then, is driving her to martyr herself?
Shaken by this mystery, Maria and her childhood friend (and Pearl’s surrogate father), Joseph Kasperman, both rush to Pearl’s side. As Mary Gordon tells the story of the bonds among them, she takes us deep into the labyrinths of maternal love, religious faith, and Ireland’s tragic history. Pearl is a grand and emotionally daring novel of ideas, told with the tension of a thriller.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
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- New York : Pantheon Books, 2004.
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