Basic Black With Pearls

A brilliant, lost feminist classic that is equal parts domestic drama and international intrigue.

Shirley and Coenraad's affair has been going on for decades, but her longing for him is as desperate as ever. She is a Toronto housewife; he works for an international organization known only as the Agency. Their rendezvous take place in Tangier, in Hong Kong, in Rome and are arranged by an intricate code based on notes slipped into issues of National Geographic. He recognizes her by her costume: a respectable black dress and string of pearls; his appearance is changeable. But something has happened, the code has been discovered, and Coenraad leads Shirley (who prefers to be known as "Lola Montez") to the last place she wants to go: her home city, the city of her impoverished immigrant childhood. In Toronto, Shirley will seek her lover in a series of locations that echo back to her the trauma of the origins she's long since left behind in her life of upper-bourgeois stability. Eventually, her wanderings lead her back to her own house, where she discards her pearls, and trades in her basic black for a dress of vibrant multicolored silk.

Helen Weinzweig published her first novel when she was fifty-eight. Basic Black with Pearls, her second, won the Toronto Book Award and has since come to be recognized as a feminist landmark. Here Weinzweig imbues the formal inventiveness of the noveau roman with a psychological poignancy and surprising humor to tell a story of simultaneous dissolution and discovery.