| Summary: |
From one of fiction's most innovative and influential voices, a heartbreaking, profound, and absurdly funny novel about being alive while the whole world is dying. The world is failing to remain a world. Its ice caps are melting. Its hot places are cooling. Species of flora and fauna are dying. People, too--all dying of different things. But what if the coming-apart world around us is only a first draft, made by some great artist in order to be destroyed? In this first draft of the world, a young woman named Mira leaves home and the doting father who raised her, to study art criticism. During these years of study she meets a woman named Annie, whose tremendous power opens Mira's chest like a portal--although to what, she doesn't know. Then Mira's father dies, and in the middle of Mira's unbearable grief his spirit passes into her. Together, they transform into a leaf, blissed-out and green on a great, old tree. But after a while, Mira finds photosynthesis boring and realizes that being alive is a problem that cannot be solved, even by a leaf. Eventually, she must remember the human world she's left behind, including Annie, and choose whether or not to return. Pure Colour is a pure galaxy of a novel: explosive, celestially bright, huge and streaked with beauty. It is a contemporary bible, an atlas of feeling, and an unexpectedly funny handbook to being alive. In its pages, Sheila Heti proves that she is a philosopher of modern experience, one who is redefining the ideas, feelings and experiences that a book can hold. |
Book
