With its elements of philosophy/self-help and fabulism it put me in mind of experiences reading Krishnamurti and Calvino. Although it’s doing something altogether different from those two in imagining the world as imbued with the spirit of God, a resacralizing of a world that increasingly looks to scientism to explain what it experiences. “Pure Colour” is a rejection of that, and a rejection of the idea that humans can fix what we find wrong here by our own actions.

“There was no asking anyone on earth, for we haven’t been created to know it,” Heti writes. We have been created to observe, and to love, with an intuition of what we are but that is all. “These lights spoke to our knowledge of another world, the world behind this world, the world of the spirit. Nobody was thinking it, but they knew it, nonetheless. Humans hadn’t lost what was most beautiful; our very small and tentative sense of the hidden, magnificent, divine.”

The novel is written in what often seems a child-like tone, it could remind me of the experience of one of my kids telling me an imaginative fable-like story. Sometimes you feel that they do go on a bit! But it also has passages of deep insight into human nature, interesting things to say on the different stages of life, and humor. “A person can waste their whole life, without even meaning to, all because another person has a really great face” was one of those lines that brought a chuckle. ( )

All I can say is while it's only February, I don't see any other books topping this one in 2022. ( )

Tried to keep my mind open but never did get it. ( )

Leaf Me Alone
Review of the Farrar, Straus & Giroux hardcover edition (February 15, 2022) with reference to the Kindle eBook.

She felt so alone in those days. Not that she minded. It is only when you get older that everyone makes you feel bad about being alone, or implies that spending time with other people is somehow better, because it proves you to be likeable.
But being unlikeable wasn't the reason she was alone. She was alone so she could hear herself thinking. She was alone so she could hear herself living.

[3.5 rounded up]
There were so many beautiful passages about solitude, love, grief, loss, death and rebirth (reawakening) in Pure Colour that I added an eBook edition in addition to my hardcover in order to make noting them easier. You can see many of those in either my status updates below or in My Kindle Notes & Highlights.

Despite that evocative writing, Pure Colour is a challenging read as it has a middle section where the protagonist and her dead father live inside a tree leaf for an extended number of pages. The protagonist Mira is initially attending a school (for critics) and working part-time in a lamp store and falls in love with a character named Annie. She leaves that behind to care for her dying father after whose passing the 'magic realism' section begins. After a period of time she returns to life and to Annie.

There is humour and sadness throughout this book and overall I did quite enjoy it. But I do understand that it would likely be a difficult read for most if you are not prepared to accept its spiritual and metaphysical aspects. Best to read them symbolically I think.

I read Pure Colour through being introduced to it at the 2023 Lakefield Literary Festival. At the Festival, Heti gave the background to the novel as being about her processing the death of her own father.

See photograph at https://scontent-ord5-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/360093745_24345228695075920_1...
Author Sheila Heti (centre) in discussion with moderator Johanna Schneller (left) and author Harley Rustad Lost in the Valley of Death: A Story of Obsession and Danger in the Himalayas (2022)) at the 2023 Lakefield Literary Festival, Canada.

Soundtrack
Inspired more by my lede once I had decided on it, but I couldn't help but listen to Traffic's Light Up or Leave Me Alone from Low Spark of High Heeled Boys (1971) album, a favourite of mine from back in the day.

Other Reviews
Love, Philosophy and Foliage by Anne Enright, The Guardian, February 16, 2022.

Trivia and Link
The CBC Books page has an extensive series of audio podcasts with Sheila Heti including an interview about the publication of Pure Colour. Earlier postings include Heti answering the CBC's version of the Proust Questionnarie. You can access all of the podcasts here. ( )

A fascinating allegorical, hybrid, parabolic text. Hard to classify, and that’s good. Pure Colour is permeated with visual arts metaphors, and it also flows like music. The text surges, then calms, then it’s delicate, ethereal, mythic, then intense, then abstract. In some places, Heti’s descriptive style resembles a crystalline stream in the sun—shards of silver light flickering over multicoloured smooth stones; in other places, her text is punctuated with rational (or surreal) philosophical set-pieces juxtaposed with character studies of unrequited longing or familial love and tension.

It is interesting to note that had Heti’s main character (Mira) immersed herself in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, especially, “I Sing the Body Electric,” she would have been unshackled from one of her greatest fears: “She [Mira] wanted a love that would cool her down, to the temperature of the living. She longed to be held by the coldest hands. If she was loved in a way that warmed her up, she feared she would be too hot to handle art, to help pass it down through the centuries” (46). ( )