The best way to describe this book is that it's like a literary forest. I know that maybe doesn't make a lot of sense, but this book didn't either. It did give me a lot to think about while reading it.

As a young woman in university studying to be a critic, Mira meets Annie. Mira immediately feels a connection to Annie who was raised in an orphanage. Eventually they drift apart. Years later Mira finds herself at her dying father’s beside. When he dies Mira feels his spirit enter her. During her period of grieving Mira discovers her father is a leaf and decides to join him. As she watches life pass by Mira spies Annie. Seeing Annie again forces Mira to reevaluate her decision to become a leaf.
PURE COLOUR is an interesting read. It is full of questions about life, living and dying. It is a well written and thought out book. As I was reading PURE COLOUR I often found myself amazed at the level of deep thinking that went into writing this book.
Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada and NetGalley for allowing me to read an advanced digital edition of this book.

Pure Colour is a gorgeous book—inventive, deeply empathetic, and a reimagining of what literature can be. In Heti's tenth book, she imagines that God is working on his first draft of creation, and each individual is put into a category of three basic types of human beings who have different approaches to life and love, and as a result, struggle with communicating; while her protagonist mourns the loss of her father, she is also intrigued by a woman who loves differently from her. Both relationships are deeply moving.

Pure Color by Sheila Heti

⭐️⭐️⭐️

* Thank you to @netgalley and @farrarstrauss and @penguinrandomhouse for providing a digital copy of Pure Color in exchange of a honest review.

What I liked about this book:
- it is way outside my confort zone; I typically don't gravitate towards philosophical/experimental books but I am glad to have reach out to this one;
- I didn't understood every concept, but I did really enjoyed to part talking about wanting to find a new planet (like making Mars human-friendly) instead of wanting to fix our planet.
Overall, this won't be my next favorite genre, I read mainly for fun so I do prefer a more linear story.

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.

The novel’s focus is the death of the protagonist Mira’s father. Soon after his last breath is taken, she feels his spirit enter into her. <spoiler>She describes this experience in sexual terms, using the word “ejaculated.”</spoiler> Later, Mira inhabits a leaf and carries on a series of conversations with her dead parent, covering such topics as the afterlife (what it’s like to be dead, to have shed one’s body and personhood); the role of art; and the fate of an ever-warming planet, our current civilization, and humanity itself. I interpreted the protagonist’s experience as her entering a kind of vegetative psychological state in which the mind continues to work at a deep, subconscious level. A leaf functions metabolically, using light to make energy, but is incapable of autonomous action, forming a plan, or purposefully engaging with life. It’s an apt metaphor for early bereavement, and Heti rightly portrays it as a potentially dangerous state from which a person may need to be pulled by another.

Early in the novel we’re told that the world in which the characters find themselves is imperfect, God’s first draft, one that He’s almost finished writing. Flawed as it is, this world has a vitality and an intensity that may be edited out in subsequent versions. It is said to be populated by different types of people or “critics”, who hatch from one of three types of egg, reflecting different aspects of God. First, there are the flighty, fragile “birds”, interested in beauty, order, harmony, and meaning, who critique from above. Next are the “fish”, whose outlook from the middle of the action is communal and whose aim is to fix what ails society. Finally, we have the “bears”, who are in the thick of things, cradling loved ones in their arms. Family and tradition matter most to this type. Mira, the central character, is a bird. Annie, a detached, rather ethereal being whom Mira loves but cannot quite connect with, is a fish, and Mira’s father, whose entire life has been built around her (to the point that she’s feared being engulfed by him) is a bear. Mira is required to resolve what constitutes the right degree of distance between herself and others, and to come to terms with the death of her father.

Though it’s not explicitly stated, Toronto is the recognizable setting of the novel. The time frame is vague and shifting. We see Mira as both a young and a middle-aged woman, but ordinary markers of human time figure very little in the novel. There is also precious little plot, and Heti’s characters are thin, more spiritual concepts than bodies in a material world. This is a novel of ideas and emotions, and its themes are ones more frequently encountered in poetry than in fiction.

The language is loose, inexact, sometimes slippery. I’ll admit I wasn’t always sure what Heti was talking about. Her refusal to indent and punctuate the long stretches of “leafy” father-daughter dialogue didn’t help matters. Ultimately, however, I was impressed and moved by the book. I often complete novels and feel no particular urge to find out what other readers think about them. This one is an exception. Rich and strange, certainly open to interpretation, it’s a fictional work that begs to be discussed with others.

Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for providing me with a free digital copy.

Rating: 3.5 rounded up

Sheila Heti is a Canadian author of many books, including "Motherhood" and "How Should a Person Be?". She is critically acclaimed and as with her previous novels this is a work of literary fiction. We meet the character of Mira and the book is really a collection of her musings through time. She talks about living in God's first draft of creation and at one point shares her existence with her dead father as a leaf on a tree. I admit that this one was just a little too weird for me, although there were some insightful comments on life. For customers that really like literary fiction, this may be a good recommendation.

It would be incredibly difficult to summarize the plot of Pure Colour, but it's the kind of book that transcends the need for a synopsis. Heti's writing is so beautiful and the concept of this book was so interesting = I felt like I had never read anything like it before. Pure Colour is highly experimental, creative, poetic, and singular. While it might be high concept and abstract at times, I still found this book to be incredibly accessible and easy to read. I think that even readers who aren't necessarily fans of this style of literature will be able to get something out of it.

This was my first Heti, and I will be delving into her other works as soon as I can!

The concept for Pure Colour is fascinating - and that's not a word I use very often. At no point in time did I have any idea where Sheila Heti was taking me, but I was here for it! The book establishes early on that we're living in the first draft of Creation, and it really does feel like we're living in this world as the story progresses. We get to follow Mira as she moves through her adult life and watch as her relationship with her father grows and transforms, just as her relationship with herself and the world around her does.

This is a book where I felt as though the author truly trusted her readers. Heti invites us to create our own meaning from this story, and at times, it felt like I was looking at an abstract painting, desperately trying to figure out the artist's intent. For that reason, this book was almost addictive. I was constantly flipping back to various quotes, searching for some kind of answer. There are countless passages in here that I know will stay with me for years to come, and I already can't wait to revisit them!

Though the writing evoked many thoughts, it was also a joy to read! Pure Colour is a book that deals with complex topics, but doesn't take itself seriously. It's wild, funny, inspiring, and relatable. It's messy and beautiful, and it made me realize that I, too, would like to be a leaf for a little while.

My copy didn’t download properly but what passages I did read were amazing. The author’s prose is gorgeous and full of tremendous feeling. I could grasp the essence of the book from just the short excerpts I read and it was beautiful.

I will likely pick up a physical copy to gain the full scope because I love unconventional books like this one.