Perla

Perla is the story of a woman who lived through the horrors of the Holocaust and would ultimately die unable to extricate herself from its corrosive memory. It is told from the point of view of her son, who, not long after losing her, learns that he is about to become a father. These two events become the impetus for reconstructing Perlas past and for understanding gestation, as hes equally in the dark about what happened in his mothers life and what is taking place in his wifes womb. Strangely, at this time he finds himself drawn to the poets Novalis, Hlderlin, and Schlegel, and the painter Caspar David Friedrichfounders of German romanticism who strove to capture the spiritual essence of the world. With and through them, he seeks peace and grapples with the question: How could Germany produce both the purest poetry and the most complete barbarity? Winner of Frances Goncourt Prize for a first novel, Frdric Bruns semiautobiographical novel considers the seemingly irreconcilable multiplicities of lifepast and present, personal and collective, self and other, life and death.