Pure Colour
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3.3 • 6 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTION
SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORKER • THE GLOBE AND MAIL • VULTURE • CBC • GLAMOUR • READER'S DIGEST CANADA
“True and newly alive.” —Los Angeles Times
“One-of-a-kind. . . . nothing less than vital.” —The Guardian
A new novel about art, love, death and time from the author of Motherhood and How Should A Person Be?
Here we are, just living in the first draft of creation, which was made by some great artist, who is now getting ready to tear it apart.
In this first draft, a woman named Mira leaves home for school. There, she meets Annie, whose tremendous power opens Mira’s chest like a portal—to what, she doesn’t know. When Mira is older, her beloved father dies, and she enters the strange and dizzying dimension that true loss opens up.
Pure Colour tells the story of a life, from beginning to end. It is a galaxy of a novel: explosive, celestially bright, huge, and streaked with beauty. It is a contemporary bible, an atlas of feeling, and a shape-shifting epic. Sheila Heti is a philosopher of modern experience, and she has reimagined what a book can hold.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
It’s really hard to describe this short, funny, and deeply touching novel from Toronto-based author Sheila Heti. Inexperienced university student Mira has a loving but complicated relationship with her father, which tends to colour how she connects to other people. After Mira meets a fascinating, alluring older woman named Annie, her father dies and…we’ll leave the rest of the story for you to discover. Written in brief chapters, many of them only a paragraph or two long, Pure Colour unfolds with the inexplicable logic of a dream. Heti’s book touches on everything from bad student parties to the notion that we’re living in a moment where God is pondering whether to scrap his first draft of humanity and start over again. Like Haruki Murakami at his strangest and funniest, Heti pulls us into a creative and wonderful story about love and grief.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Heti (How Should a Person Be?) delivers an underwhelming fable, a sort of Generation X Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Here, God has created three kinds of people: bird, fish, and bear. Birds are ambitious, fish are socially minded, and bears love with focus and intensity. Mira, the main character, is a bird, born to a bear father, with whom she has an emotionally incestuous relationship. Annie, a fellow student at the American Academy of American Critics whom Mira has a crush on, is a fish. Heti romanticizes the characters' time in school, which apparently took place shortly before the advent of smartphones: "They just didn't consider the fact that one day they would be walking around with phones in the future, out of which people who had far more charisma than they did would let flow an endless stream of images and words." Mira is prone to overblown mysticism; after her father dies, she imagines she "felt his spirit ejaculate into her, like it was the entire universe coming into her body." Stricken by grief, she hopes for relief from Annie, though their contrasting animal natures complicate the relationship. Just what the point of it all is remains something of a mystery. Even Heti's fans will be flummoxed.
