Pure Colour
A Novel
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4.0 • 28 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2022 Governor General’s Literary Award in Fiction
Shortlisted for the 2023 Rathbones Folio Prize in Fiction
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vulture, The Times Literary Supplement, and more
Pure Colour is a galaxy of a novel: explosive, celestially bright, huge, and streaked with beauty. It is a contemporary bible, an atlas of feeling, and an absurdly funny guide to the great (and terrible) things about being alive. Sheila Heti is a philosopher of modern experience, and she has reimagined what a book can hold.
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 of the world, a woman named Mira leaves home to study. 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 his spirit passes into her. Together, they become a leaf on a tree. But photosynthesis gets boring, and being alive is a problem that cannot be solved, even by a leaf. Eventually, Mira must remember the human world she’s left behind, including Annie, and choose whether or not to return.
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 color 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.
Customer Reviews
Really meh
I would give this book ideally 2.5 stars but there no half stars. I read a critics review of this calling it very “online” which I couldn’t agree with more. I think Heti is trying to do a lot but a lot of it comes off as unintentional and uninspiring. There are definitely some interesting philosophical theories going on but none of them are past interesting. The novel tries very hard to be thought provoking but comes off as a first draft. I had really high hopes for this book but there were so many times I almost DNFd it. I think it just feels VERY millennial, and I kind of can’t stand it. There are better pieces of literature for sure that are more thought provoking and better written and more worth your time. I wouldn’t read this knowing what I know now.