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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Sep 2015, 576 pages
Paperback:
Aug 2016, 608 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Poornima Apte
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A magnum opus for our morally complex times from the author of Freedom
Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother - her only family - is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she'll ever have a normal life.
Enter the Germans. A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads Pip to an internship in South America with The Sunlight Project, an organization that traffics in all the secrets of the world--including, Pip hopes, the secret of her origins. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur who rose to fame in the chaos following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn't understand, and the intensity of her response to him upends her conventional ideas of right and wrong.
Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder. The author of The Corrections and Freedom has imagined a world of vividly original characters - Californians and East Germans, good parents and bad parents, journalists and leakers - and he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as ancient as the war between the sexes. Purity is the most daring and penetrating book yet by one of the major writers of our time.
Purity in Oakland
Monday
"Oh pussycat, I'm so glad to hear your voice," the girl's mother said on the telephone. "My body is betraying me again. Sometimes I think my life is nothing but one long process of bodily betrayal."
"Isn't that everybody's life?" the girl, Pip, said. She'd taken to calling her mother midway through her lunch break at Renewable Solutions. It brought her some relief from the feeling that she wasn't suited for her job, that she had a job that nobody could be suited for, or that she was a person unsuited for any kind of job; and then, after twenty minutes, she could honestly say that she needed to get back to work.
"My left eyelid is drooping," her mother explained. "It's like there's a weight on it that's pulling it down, like a tiny fisherman's sinker or something."
"Right now?"
"Off and on. I'm wondering if it might be Bell's palsy."
"Whatever Bell's palsy is, I'm sure you ...
Franzen fluidly dissects the meaning of identity and the intersection between our online avatars and our flesh-and-blood realities. Likening the Internet to a new brand of totalitarianism, he shows how media narratives can warp reality to such an extent that the constructed persona begins to feel more real than the original person ever was. The stories we tell ourselves — and the ones we chose to present to society — bind us in unforgiving ways, Franzen implies. By the time Andreas Wolf wants to break out of his “save the world hero” mold, it is too late. “I’m not doing this job because I still believe in it,” he says, “It’s all about me now. It’s my identity.” In this and many other ways, it is the novel’s particular brand of cynicism that is perhaps the most direct reflection of contemporary American society...continued
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(Reviewed by Poornima Apte).
In Purity, Andreas Wolf, who starts The Sunlight Project to expose corruption worldwide, is often compared to Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks.
A computer scientist by training, Assange was named to Forbes magazine's "Most Powerful People" list in 2010 for being the "genius provocateur behind Wikileaks, hard at work providing startling glimpse of near future, where confidential and classified documents are routinely made available to the general public."
"Governments and corporations with dirty laundry should be afraid, very afraid," the article said. And indeed, the U.S. government was embarrassed by a string of leaks of classified documents, military reports, and hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables that Wikileaks ...
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