Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | FICTION HET | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Lake Elmo Library | FICTION HET | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION HET | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
Sheila Heti was born in Toronto, Canada in 1976. She studied playwriting at the National Theatre School and philosophy at the University of Toronto.
Heti runs Trampoline Hall, a monthly lecture series, and writes regularly about the visual arts. Her title The Middle Stories was Shortlisted for the 2001 Upper Canada Writer's Craft Award. Heti was voted Best Emerging Writer in NOW magazine's Reader's Poll in 2001. In September 2010, Heti's book How Should a Person Be?, was published by Henry Holt in the United States in July 2012. It was chosen by The New York Times as one of the 100 Best Books of 2012 and by The New Yorker as one of the best books of the year.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. Agent: Jim Rutman, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Feb.)
Guardian Review
Ejaculated is a tough word to place in a novel, these days. Nobody uses it to describe dialogue any more and in a sexual context it seems a little functional. Also, for technical reasons, it is tricky to employ from a female point of view. So the reader really does notice when Sheila Heti's narrator says that something has been ejaculated into her "by the universe" and that something, which is now "spreading all the way through her, the way cum feels", is the spirit of her much-loved, just?dead father. But each to her own - you have to admire the leap. I was pulled into Pure Colour, Heti's follow-up to 2018's Motherhood, by a description of life before the internet that held a nostalgia I needed to name. Mira begins the novel in a world now lost to us: it was a time when choice was limited and things stayed particular. This was before seasons became "postmodern", before we knew that "there were so many ways of being hated, and one could be hated by so many people". In those days you could see a certain lamp in a shop and know it was your favourite lamp of all time, and "your friends were simply who was around". This was how it was for Mira going to a college that is, in this emblematic universe, called "the American Academy of American Critics". With a group of these random, particular friends, Mira visits a woman's apartment. It is evening and the windows "just reflected back their sorry faces, while on the outside was the watery night". The apartment belongs to Annie, who is an orphan, and Mira falls in love with her for reasons she cannot explain: "A person can waste their whole life, without even meaning to, all because another person has a really great face." The friends disperse, Mira goes home to her ailing father, and when he dies, the book becomes fully strange. As his spirit departs his body, it enters Mira and it is as though all her deficiencies have been filled up - "all her sorry spaces, all her spiritual empties". Despite this, Mira feels his absence keenly. Death has turned the world inside out. It is not as though the dead go into a different room; her life has been transformed into a different room, where she is now trapped without him. One day Mira returns to a tree they both liked and she enters a leaf. She then stays in the leaf for another 40 pages or so - which is a long time in a book, but perhaps a short time to be in a leaf, beyond all desiring, and in the company of your dead father, who is also entirely contented. During this sojourn, Mira considers art, God, love and the transmigration of souls. We are living, she says, in the first draft of the world, which will be rewritten by God any day soon. Not many people will make it into the next draft, which will have fewer mistakes and be less exciting. Meanwhile, "Here we are, just living in the credits at the end of the movie. Everyone wants to see their name up on the screen." Pure Colour is the apocalypse written as trance, a sleepwalker's song about the end of all things. And although the book is full of regret for all that will be lost, there is solace in the idea that we will, mostly, die together. The problem with death was never mortality, but timing. If I were not a reviewer but a friend, I would press this book into your hand, and say, "It's a bit mad, but I think you will like it." Then I might change the subject for a while, because the truth is that Pure Colour will not be for everyone. It spends a lot of time in a leaf. It is relentlessly abstract. And it's not actually mad, it is a mystical text with its own (not entirely rigorous, but who cares about that) system or cosmology. The mysticism runs close to poetry and owes, I suspect, more to Kabbalism than to the Christian tradition. Mira is more uplifted than ecstatic: her visions are lightly ironic, fully human and endearing. Apart from the ejaculation thing (itself oddly unsexual), love in the book is desexualised. You might even call it "post-sexual", if you wanted to talk about female writers, in these anxious days, moving beyond the body to ideas of universal love, or even of God. Mira finds her way out of the leaf and back into the pursuit of love. Her conclusions are about the importance of family and tradition - a surprisingly conventional answer, which feels like a return. Like a lot of mystics, she prefers vegetable to animal life and is wary of human reproduction. Of mothers (there is no mother in Mira's life), she says: "Until they pushed a person out of their dirtiest parts, they had no one they could truly love, and no one who could truly love them." This is, in many ways, the opposite of what I think about reproduction, but this is a novel that is happy to compass contradictions. It is a system, not an opinion. It is a philosophical tale. There is also Heti's lovely prose to enjoy, her beautifully sustained tone, the way she is, as a writer, earnest, funny and sweet. Pure Colour is an original, a book that says something new for our difficult times. It's a bit mad, but I think you will like it.
Kirkus Review
A woman considers living, loving, the Earth, and art. Any attempt to summarize Heti's luminous new novel will inevitably leave it sounding faded and flat. There is a woman named Mira; for a while, she works in a lamp store. Mira's father dies. Mira loves a woman named Annie. In addition to these more prosaic details, there is the fact that life in this book--existence as a whole, in fact--is a draft. It is God's first draft. "On good days," Heti writes, "we acknowledged that God had done pretty well: he had given us life, and had filled in most of the blanks of existence, except for the blank in the heart." As in her earlier works, Heti's focus is not only on the world of her own story, but on the very possibilities of the novel as a form. Again and again, she stretches those possibilities until they grow as taut as a wire. After Mira's father dies, his consciousness--and hers, too--ends up in a leaf. Best not to ask about the mechanics of this move. In the leaf, they "talk" to one another about art and death and time, in long paragraphs that don't differentiate between speakers. "Don't think that in death you go far from the earth," someone says; "you remain down here with everything--the part of you that loved, which is the most important part." But at the same time that she is contending with large, abstract questions, Heti is a master of the tiniest, most granular detail. Her prose can be both sweeping and particular. On one page, Mira and her father think of time as a billion-year expanse; on another, she and Annie buy a box of chocolates. The book is as exquisitely crafted as those sweets must have been. Heti's latest is that rarest of novels--as alien as a moon rock and every bit as wondrous. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In this quietly provoking and unusual novel from Heti (Motherhood, 2018), Mira processes the loss of her father in light of the dissolution of another love, with Annie. Mira once studied at the American Academy of American Critics, where she first encountered the marvelous Annie, but never made a name for herself in the field. With her father's death, she feels a similar failure: that she'd loved art more than she loved him, and therefore couldn't have loved him enough. Nonetheless, after he dies she feels his spirit enter her body before she, in great despair, becomes a spirit herself and the two cohabitate in a leaf overlooking a lake that Annie sometimes visits. In the leaf, the father-daughter spirits exchange pages of stream-of-consciousness conversations on the nature of love, death, family, faith, and our world, which is getting hotter in its soon-to-end first draft. In their words, Mira finds sort of a way forward. Mixing the spiritual, philosophical, and mundane, Heti's out-of-the-ordinary approach yields familiar feelings about hope and the universality of art.
Library Journal Review
The world is falling apart, with ice melting and species dying--as in our world, though it's not ours as we know it; it could well be a first draft that the artist in charge will destroy at any moment. Into this experiment wanders Mira, who is united with her father's spirit when he dies; they exist as a leaf on a tree until she starts longing to return to the human world. From ever original award winner Heti (How Should a Person Be?).
