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A Novel
by Sheila Heti
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.
"Forthright, attentive, unembarrassed, radiant with wonder, serious yet feather-light ... Courageous in [its] willingness to plunge so wholeheartedly into the unknowable ... The fantastical quality of Pure Colour has given [Heti] the unfettered freedom to create, in the knowledge that every creation can only be provisional, a flawed first draft. Uncertainty is the paradoxical binding agent of Ms. Heti's myth-making and this lovely book." ―Wall Street Journal
"An explicitly mystical book about the creation of art and the creation of the universe, about the death of a father and the death of ego, about the uses and abuses of doubt ... So new ... This book, so full of argument, feels weightless. I note this with wonder... Heti's books aim to be vessels for the transformation of reader and writer." ―The New Yorker
"[Heti's] novels are quests for the holy inside the profane ... Pure Colour is unabashedly metaphysical and completely outlandish. At the same time, this is a book of mourning, specifically for a father. Heti's tone is more somber and searching than it has ever been, as she turns over and over fundamental questions of life and death, creation and extinction, with her trademark penchant for paradox." ―The Atlantic
"Brazenly strange ... Heti's metaphorical range keeps you on your toes ... An impressive spectrum of meaning and feeling, both abstract and tangible, solemn as well as silly, hitting notes that recall Ovid, Kafka and, oddly, the climax of Christopher Nolan's Interstellar. The wacky metaphysics generate a what-if? comedy that gains voltage from Heti's refusal to milk it for allegory ... One-of-a-kind, curious in two senses ... Nothing less than vital." ―The Guardian
This information about Pure Colour was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sheila Heti is the author of eleven books, including the novels Pure Colour, Motherhood,and How Should a Person Be?, which New York deemed one of the "New Classics" of the twenty-first century. She was named one of the "New Vanguard" by the New York Times book critics, who, along with a dozen other magazines and newspapers, chose Motherhood as a top book of 2018. Her books have been translated into twenty-four languages. She lives in Toronto.
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