Pure Colour
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. more
224 pages, Hardcover
First published Farrar, Straus and Giroux
3.48
Rating
14775
Ratings
3159
Reviews
Sheila Heti
45 books 1727 followers
Sheila Heti is the author of ten books, including the novels Motherhood and How Should a Person Be? Her upcoming novel, Pure Colour, will be published on February 15, 2022.Her second children’s book, A Garden of Creatures, illustrated by Esme Shapiro, will be published in May 2022.
She was named one of "The New Vanguard" by The New York Times; a list of fifteen writers from around the world who are "shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century." Her books have been translated into twenty-three languages.
Motherhood was chosen by the book critics at the New York Times as one of the top books of 2018, and New York magazine chose it as the Best Book of the year. How Should a Person Be? was named one of the 12 “New Classics of the 21st century” by Vulture. It was a New York Times Notable Book, a best book of the year in The New Yorker, and was cited by Time as "one of the most talked-about books of the year.”
Women in Clothes, a collaboration with Leanne Shapton, Heidi Julavits, and 639 women from around the world, was a New York Times bestseller. She is also the author of a children’s book titled We Need a Horse, with art by Clare Rojas.
Her play, All Our Happy Days are Stupid, had sold-out runs at The Kitchen in New York and Videofag in Toronto.
She is the former Interviews Editor of The Believer magazine, and has conducted many long-form print interviews with writers and artists, including Joan Didion, Elena Ferrante, Agnes Varda, Sophie Calle, Dave Hickey and John Currin. Her fiction and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, Bookforum, n+1, Granta, The London Review of Books, and elsewhere.
She has spoken at the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, the New Yorker Festival, the 92nd Street Y, the Hammer Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and at universities across North America, and festivals internationally. Her six-hour lecture on writing, delivered in the Spring of 2021, can be purchased through the Leslie Shipman agency.
She is the founder of the Trampoline Hall lecture series, and appeared in Margaux Williamson’s 2012 film Teenager Hamlet, and in Leanne Shapton’s book, Important Artifacts. She lives in Toronto.
Community reviews
Every sentence opened me. I felt as if this book were speaking to me privately and intimately, about private joys and private melancholy. I fell into a profound sense of being in a personal conversation with what I was reading on the page. I was reminded of what I should be paying attention to in my life--both in my big life--what it's all about--and in the small daily moments--what beauty there is to be found in them. The book worked on a pre-semantic level in me, where the meanings of the words were deeper than the words themselves. more
I have pestered many people into reading How Should A Person Be. and Motherhood, and I'm about to be so annoying about this one as well. . more
anything described as "a galaxy of a novel" is something i want to read. much like a galaxy, this contained some good stuff (like being beautifully written) and some bad stuff (like being weird). the beautifully written bit is of the Sentences That Will Change Your Whole Perspective While Being Poetic And Lovely On A Page By Page Basis, and the weird bit is content that will make you question where the line is re: incest. overall, it turns out it's a trade i'll take. or maybe not, but regardless, the ending was so stunning and wonderful it balanced everything. more
these are just words. these are just words on a page. let’s start with the book description itself “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. more
i changed my mind this is a five starjust can't stop thinking about thisloved the profound simplicityloved getting lost in a leaf. more
One day the universe got high and ejaculated and out came this book. I don’t think this is as inventive or profound as some people do. But if you like Sheila Heti, and are in a certain head space, then by all means light an incense candle, sample a tincture, and enjoy this book. more
Until page 115, I was immersed in this deft, strange, grief-laden (both personal and global) end-times world, in what is apparently the first draft of the world. That the plot is tissue-thin, the characters too, that Annie is no more than a device, that the storyline is episodic and abrupt, was intriguing. The prose, often endearing, swept me along. The daddy issues, or perhaps more accurately termed enmeshment, that seem to permeate Mira's relationship with her father - his spirit "ejaculating" into her, well, it's a brave leap. When Mira goes into a leaf, in a tree both she and her father liked, into the leaf where her father is, and stays in that leaf for 40 or so pages, accompanied by declarations about and interrogations of mortality, death, grief, art, God, love (although the "love" in the book seems curiously desexualized, or perhaps post-sexual), the solar system, criticism (critics of art and literature as Gods of some sort), the transmigration of souls, various philosophies, etc. more
I think it's time to accept that whilst the broad overarching ideas of Sheila Heti's fiction appeal to me somewhat in the abstract, the resulting novels are just not my cup of tea. For one thing I should have taken the descriptions of the "contemporary bible" element in the blurb more seriously: there are a lot of mentions of God, which is obviously fine if that's your kind of thing but unfortunately it's not mine. I've never been a particular fan of novels with themes that are religion-heavy (just a personal preference), and the whole "second go at creation" plot point and idea of the protagonist Mina having her dead father's soul inside her didn't really work for me -- neither did the descriptions that it had been "ejaculated into her". Oh, and the main character gets stuck inside the leaf of a tree at one point as well. (Yes, I'm aware that I should've read the blurb more carefully instead of getting sucked in by the pre-publication hype. more
The death of a parent. I haven’t experienced it yet. My friends have. I am terrified of it. When I sit there and think about it, it’s as if the chair or the couch or the mattress I’m sitting on is opening up under me, and the only thing that’s speeding toward the abyss in freefall is my heart. more
Whoever wrote the blurb for this book deserves a raise. “A galaxy of a novel … celestially bright … a contemporary bible, an atlas of feeling … absurdly funny”. Needless to say, my expectations were celestially high and I ended up disappointed. Pure Colour is “biblical” in the sense that it begins with the opening line of Genesis, and invokes God as a means of exploring the idea of a departed father figure. In this book Heti explores grief through a kind of mystical parable involving crazy transformations and overlappings of souls. more
54th book of 2022. Went in with high hopes which were quickly dashed. There's no real plot to speak of in this novel, which isn't usually a problem for me, plotless books are kind of my thing, but they have to be well-written or philosophical or bring something else instead. Heti tries really hard and it shows all the way through. At some points I was almost cringing at how hard she tries to make this into some sort of philosophical musing of a book. more
It was a slog, but I finally made it out of Heti’s boring repetitive sky daddy issues leaf and I’m ready to slip into anything else. more
dnf @ 47% | oh gosh. this was so pretentious and full of nonsense, i‘m so sorry. i‘m not bourgeois enough for shit like this. a perfect example of why i always used to look at literary fiction from a negative perspective; this felt so high-brow for the sake of being high-brow and i keep thinking of that one quote from sally rooney‘s 'normal people' that talked about literature as a class performance. i contemplated pushing through because this book is such a quick read but…. more
Shortlisted for the 2022 Folio Prize I am really not sure what to say about this novel, which at times has moments of almost transcendent spiritual writing but which too often verges on being completely coo-coo. Translated from the French (particularly if by an Eastern European born author exiled there) and this would I think be hailed by some as genius – but equally well published by a lesser known English author and I think it would be taken by most as parody. To the extent the novel has a plot: a young woman Mira, in the years immediately pre social media, leaves home and her close relationship with her single parent father, works at a lamp store and studies at the International Satellite school of a (fictitious) American Academy for critics – a kind of cultural elite who “didn’t consider the fact that one day they would be walking around with phones, out of which people who had far more charisma then they did would let flow an endless stream of images and words” (which for me was rather a neat encapsulation of how Booktube for example has marginalised the role of the professional and typically compromised MSM book reviewer). There she meets Alice – a slightly older woman and the two commence a relationship over time, before Alice returns home to her dying father. There things which are already veer between the interesting (God as an artist and the current world as his first draft, one he has decided “contained too many flaws” and so is bringing climate change to redraft it) to the slightly odd (the world divided into birds focused on the abstract, fish focused on communal good and bears focused on close relationships is OK – but that the bears come from bear eggs not so much) - take a decided turn for the weird. more
One sunny afternoon, when Mira and her father were standing in the garden, he promised that one day he would buy her all sorts of mysterious, rare and marvellous things, including pure colour — not something that was coloured, but colour itself. Colour itself came in hard little circular disks, and was shiny like a polished stone or a polished jewel, but with its colour deep inside it. It showed its colour on the outside, for its outside was what it was all the way through. But unlike a gemstone, it didn’t emanate colour. Its colour sat there, turned inwards. more
ebook …. 224 page book . …. synced with audiobook…. read by Sheila Heti Heti’s ‘child-sounding’ voice worked perfectly reflecting the character of Mira…. more
oh my god. okay. i don't have words for how much i loved this or how special this was to me. it feels like the very essence of this book touched the very essence of me; it was beautiful, expansive, at once spiritual and grounded, and brimming to the top with love — for life, for the universe, for love itself. reading this felt like i was perched atop a leaf that was tumbling through the air, sun-dappled and breezy. more
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐Genre: Literary FictionThe synopsis of the book says that “Pure Color is a galaxy of a novel, explosive, celestially bright, huge, and streaked with beauty. ” I couldn’t agree more with this statement. This is a truly exquisite story. It is the story of a girl named Mira, her relationship with her father, her lover Annie, and how she copes with losing her father. But that is just the tiny surface. more
Sheila Heti appreciates and exploits the flexibility of the novel. Her latest book is an unconventional, even peculiar one —by turns stimulating, frustrating, and affecting. There’s a rough, unfinished feel to it, and parts are quite opaque. Deceptively simple prose and a third-person telling sometimes make the novel read like a fable for children, but there are mythopoeic elements and long fantastical, surreal stretches as well, where the book moves beyond the fabulistic. I sometimes wondered if the author wasn’t a bit mad. more
DNF halfway. This is the third Sheila Heti novel I've left unfinished, so perhaps I could finally learn something from this experience. more
I hated this book and then it just hit me in a different register and then I got it. It’s a brilliant and poetic and profound book. You have to give it some time and withhold judgement for a while. But—it’s not for everyone. It’s really unstructured and totally metaphorical and I think it can slip into banality at times—but on the whole it’s brilliant . more
Just no. No. If this is what passes for Fiction now, we are in the endgame. more
a book that makes your heart and mind feel full simultaneously . more
A deeply strange, mythical, philosophical book full of simply put complex ideas about the nature of existence and how to live a life and figure out what kind of person you are and die. It reminded me of the work of Gertude Stein and Jeanette Winterson, in its ability to be utterly relevant to the present moment but feel as timeless as if it were a fairy tale written centuries ago. In some ways this book is very intellectual, but it also made me feel deeply. There are many passages I copied down, some of which I feel like are contenders for tattoos or things I want to be said at my funeral. more
Utterly overcome by this. It gave me hope amidst modern midlife despair at the end of the world which I didn’t think was possible. Gorgeous, expansive, transcendent. A perfect and brilliant book that catapults my understanding of what a novel can be into a new and exciting dimension. more
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. Pure Colour ~~ Shelia HetiI knew I had to read Pure Colour after reading my friend Alan’s review. more
I think Sheila Heti is one of the more insufferable people writing today. I couldn't make it through Motherhood, but Pure Colour pulled me through simply because of its oddity. But what an awfully nonrigorous ending. Constructing a cosmology and writing minimalistically about vague existential truths does not a powerfully metaphysical novel make. Whether the book be about grief, art criticism, God, friendship, etc. more
Leaf Me AloneReview 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. more
This would be 1 star, but Sheila Heti has a way with turns of phrases that make things shift in my brain and click into place in a way they haven't before. Other than that, this book is almost entirely esoteric drivel, with a weird Oedipal dynamic as a bonus. The majority of this book is absolutely baffling. I am convinced that, were she not already a well-known and respected author, there is no way this book would have been published. :) Some quotes I did like, though: "Here in the first draft of existence, we crafted our own second drafts—stories and books and movies and plays—polishing our stones to show God and each other what we wanted the next draft to be, comforting ourselves with our visions. more