Sheila Heti

Pure Colour is a moving and astonishing novel, as unique as each of Sheila Heti's books have been, but also transcendent in a new way: a work that illuminates a full spectrum of thought and feeling. It's about "the world beyond this world"; about God and critics and school and death and love and fathers and orphans and lamps. Mira left home. Then she got a job at a lamp store. The lamp store sold Tiffany lamps, and other lamps made of coloured glass. Each lamp was extremely expensive. The least expensive one cost four hundred dollars. This was a month's salary for her. Every day, before they closed up for the night, Mira had to turn off every single lamp. This took about eleven minutes. Mostly she turned off lamps by pulling on little beaded cords. She had to be careful not to let the cord snap back and hit the bulb or the lamp. She had to pull the cords with a gentle sort of care. It was tedious work. Mira didn't have the morning shift. That person had to turn on the lamps. Their job was no better than hers.

A Novel

Pure Colour

Kristina Bonitz

Both making life and making art are pouring spirit into form. 

It is only those with icebox hearts and icebox hands who have the coldness of soul equal to the task of keeping art fresh for the centuries, preserved in the freezer of their hearts and minds. For art is not made for living bodies-it is made for the cold, eternal soul.

Yet in the midst of all this, one could still see, on ones bookshelf. books that ere hundreds-even thousands!-of years old, that were relevant today. Yet none of the books which were twenty years old years old were the least bit relevant anymore. How a book has to make it through that awkward stage before it becomes something natural, an integral part of human civilization, as solid and inevitable as a tree. 

Some people experienced a delightful sort of rest in becoming very small, very inferior, and very irrelevant, in the face of such chaos and change. 

Some people grew nervous that they would be left behind by the times; these people turned their backs on culture and took pleasure in the days passing the way they always had with the sun rising in the morning, and going down at night. We were curious about the world to come, but were relieved that its problems would not be our own. 

On such occasions, it is often the gods who are to blame. slip into a person like an amoeba, and from within one they watch another one-the one they have chosen to watch. 

It doesn’t always happen mutually this way, but in their case it did - the gods just taking notes on humans, to make us better in the next draft of the world. 

With a few people in one's life, too much happens emotionally-more than even makes sense to happen, given how little has actually occurred. Such people are deeply ignit- ing in a way that others are not. This igniting always happens in the first instant and it never goes away. No stupidities can destroy the igniting, so even if those two people never meet again, a connection always remains. …

It wasn’t that Mira had met her in some previous life. It was that she was meeting her in this one - and isn’t that rare! Why is it so hard to meet in this life? 

At least God had given the sunrise-to those of us who lived on a cliff. At least he had given us a bit of love if not enough to see us through to the end of our lives. 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. On good days we acknowledged that God had done pretty well: he had given us life, and had filled in most of the blanks of existence, except for the blank in the heart. 

On good days, we acknowledged that God had done pretty well: he had given us life, and had filled in most of the blanks of existence, except for the blank in the heart. 

She knows that the colour of that room is how they all felt, and that colour is not just a representation of the world, but of the feelings in a room, and the meaningfulness of a room in time. 

rain/anagha

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.

But she didn’t think of herself as a person back then. She didn’t think of herself as someone who another person could see, evaluate, and finally judge.

Your friends were simply who was around. It didn’t occur to anyone that it could be another way. If you liked your friends, that was okay. If you didn’t like your friends, that was okay, too.

And she loved her meagre little existence, which was entirely her own.

What of the strength of our connections with certain people, and the weakness of our connections with certain other ones?

As the past cooled, it changed states. It had once been a solid, then it became a gas. Or it had been a gas first, then it became a liquid, and she was left holding the muck of it in her hands.

that sometimes a person is meant to move forward in the world with the one they love at a distance, and that the distance is there to make it more beautiful. To find the right distance from everything in life is the most important thing. To stand at the right distance, like God standing back from the canvas—for you can’t see anything if you’re too up close, and you can’t see anything if you’re too far back.

Were we the lucky ones, to have been chosen to live in this terrible time—to have been chosen to live in this heartbreaking time—as any moment in human civilization will break your heart, but none more so than the end?

You know the gods consider you dangerous if you are tired all the time.

People should care for other people because they are familiar—because they’re also humans—not because they’re family.

Jessie Kronke

She had given herself no time to determine if the spirit of her father is still inside her, but-Oh there! She can feel it! Rising in her chest! It was not gone, but sleeping, dormant, waiting to be called! It does not know its way around her yet. It does not know where in her body it wants to be. She will have to help it-to stop smoking and look into her chest, where this new spirit grows, rising. When it senses that she is looking for it, it expresses a surge of joy just to be seen-the same way her father expressed joy when she went to see him or called. He was always so happy just to see her. In the exact same way, his spirit is happy to be near. Perhaps her father wanted her so close simply because the spirit inside of him did, for inside of her lived his spirit's kin-but in his life they were held apart in two separate bodies. Then they were, at last, reconciled.

It was a reminder of what a human self was, and what a human life was: not a beautiful glass lamp just this side of being broken, or a lovely gold ring with a single dent in it. But a battered old seashell, formed over millions of years, made to endure.

This was my first introduction to the author and it was a bit underwhelming from the reviews people would give. I do think it’s a wonderful book to read about grief and the importance of moving on. It’s definitely a book I would like to revisit later in my life. 

Jazmin

I think this book didn’t translate well to audiobook. It should be more pondered and read in your head in chunks. (Maybe because it’s better seen in well written one off lines, instead of a whole coherent picture)

Chris Mock

Pure Colour takes the meaning of life concept and splits it into digestible forms. It then proceeds to pick those forms apart, roll them into a ball, and hurl them at me. Heiti's writing style is like reading a diary that is only stream of consciousness and blurs the time in between each scene. It's as if I was high when reading this. It makes you feel emotional, then confused, then you come to realize the bigger picture. It was an interesting short read and made me think which one am I in God's world: a fish, a bird, or a bear?

bri (´｡• ᵕ •｡`) ♡

katrina montgomery

I am an avowed Sheila Heti fan, but this book didn’t work for me. It felt so scattered. I think her style works better in fist person; the narrative voice here made everything impersonal and kind of hallow for me.

rita

this is a bible in the way that there’s for sure valuable lessons in it (or so i’m told) and there’s beautiful sentences (i’ve never read the bible) and maybe i’ll understand when i’m Older and I believe. 

it was also very boring and i kept on falling asleep while reading this book even though i’ve been sleeping 9 hours everyday! i took a 3 hour nap after reading the middle 20 pages 

i’ll for sure think of concepts from this book once in a while and feel smart but otherwise i gained nothing from this book! lots of sex metaphors that i didn’t understand and what was mira on 

when is this book set . why was she a leaf. is this book a bedtime story. 
yea! wouldn’t have finished this book if it wasn’t cut up into a paragraph a page and i skimmed over the punctuationless dialogue! yea idek. so much to think about because nothing happened! the spotify playlist i found for this book was so fun though i love indie


however the book and the music in that playlist is kinda like the post folklore/punisher effect on indie music and post normal people effect on literary fiction 


ALSO in the middle of when the GOD part started sticking out to me i was preached to by a friend’s mom at a birthday party which was kinda painful


yeah! too abstract maybe i’m not built for literary fiction :/. the first part where she was just doing things in toronto and kissing girls and talking to Matthew and college and whatever was kinda fun but maybe that’s cause i’m a teenager LOL

#yas

farah farooq

I fell asleep halfway through and have no idea how it ended. frankly i don’t even want to know. this was just a pretentious piece of word vomit

Will Vunderink

Jaden Nelson

Sweet little book about life, death, and love. A really cool new way of looking at a lot of things in life like dying, connections to the people around you, God, existence, and our souls. Cool book, give it a chance, and don’t take it too literally.

arth

The first half of the book sold me to what I deem as an interesting depiction of grief of losing a father and the desire to be oneself as a critic entity which find certain amusement and maybe some contemplation in God’s or human’s art. Sheila Heti is no doubt is a gifted writer and I love how the prose was written in such beautiful way that evoked some thinking from me. But, at the nearest end of the book, I lost my grip to make sense the overall enjoyment it’s trying to convey. I won’t say this one is boring, but you really need to be in certain head space to enjoy this book, and that’s not what happened to me. It’s still an interesting book to read but not as much as I expected to be.

3,5/5⭐️

if you like herbal teas and patrick watson’s music you will also probably enjoy this deeply

ame 

Some lovely moments and thoughts, I like Heti’s perspective. Biggest critique is the big lack of narrative structure and overall character development. 

I never mind not knowing exactly what’s happening in a story (I actually often really enjoy those books), but the writing style was so straightforward that having such an incredibly ambiguous narrative was contradictory and off-putting. I also finished barely knowing the protagonist—we learn more about the two people most important to her most of all, which makes her feel shallow and dull (and these people as well, since they’re being viewed from her perspective). The story had an unintentional wall around both plot and characters. 

Some positives: the analogy of the three different types of people was an interesting and convincing foundation. A lot of highlights about the protagonist’s outlook on life in general, the first and second drafts, faith, fixers, etc. Favorite section was the leaf—those conversations and general writing were the most intriguing and conceptually comprehensible, in my opinion.

Glad I read it, but definitely did not live up to its potential. Great cover.

taylor miles hopkins

Some lovely moments and thoughts, I like Heti’s perspective. Biggest critique is the big lack of narrative structure and overall character development. 

I never mind not knowing exactly what’s happening in a story (I actually often really enjoy those books), but the writing style was so straightforward that having such an incredibly ambiguous narrative was contradictory and off-putting. I also finished barely knowing the protagonist—we learn more about the two people most important to her most of all, which makes her feel shallow and dull (and these people as well, since they’re being viewed from her perspective). The story had an unintentional wall around both plot and characters. 

Some positives: the analogy of the three different types of people was an interesting and convincing foundation. A lot of highlights about the protagonist’s outlook on life in general, the first and second drafts, faith, fixers, etc. Favorite section was the leaf—those conversations and general writing were the most intriguing and conceptually comprehensible, in my opinion.

Glad I read it, but definitely did not live up to its potential. Great cover.

This book was very interesting but used some interesting words and imagery that were jarring to me as a reader 

Abby Willett

Nicolás Niño 

On God’s second draft, this book will be its bible.

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.

i loved so many parts of this book. some of it was hard to follow, but my favourite segments were written beautifully and we’re really sweet. 

Ruby Emmeline Fisher

it's always frustrating to finish a book you did not particularly enjoy reading, but so many lines and quotes have gutted you, so now you're not sure how to rate it.

that's how i feel about this book because although the fragmented and at times nonsensical storytelling completely lost me, sheila heti has a way with words that made me say 'oh my god i have to sit down with what i just read and think it through'. this was profound, but also sometimes surface-level philosophy that is trying to be deep; confusing, but i also get what it's trying to say. my favorite scenes are probably those 'conversations' of mira and her father when they turned into a leaf because it reminded me so much of that rock scene from everything everywhere all at once. and can we talk about the ENDING? i swear i was so close to bawling my eyes out if only i wasn't confused for the most part of the story.

overall a beautifully written and highly reflective story about life, death, the universe, and the human condition, so if you're in for those deep conversation topics, then pure colour is for you.

it's always frustrating to finish a book you did not particularly enjoy reading, but so many lines and quotes have gutted you, so now you're not sure how to rate it.

that's how i feel about this book because although the fragmented and at times nonsensical storytelling completely lost me, sheila heti has a way with words that made me say 'oh my god i have to sit down with what i just read and think it through'. this was profound, but also sometimes surface-level philosophy that is trying to be deep; confusing, but i also get what it's trying to say. my favorite scenes are probably those 'conversations' of mira and her father when they turned into a leaf because it reminded me so much of that rock scene from everything everywhere all at once. and can we talk about the ENDING? i swear i was so close to bawling my eyes out if only i wasn't confused for the most part of the story.

overall a beautifully written and highly reflective story about life, death, the universe, and the human condition, so if you're in for those deep conversation topics, then pure colour is for you.

雪 xue

4.5/5 my toxic trait is that my fav authors are white women

Super pretentious and obnoxious view of art/ who can make and critique art. Didn't help the orator had a really annoying voice

Abbey

Sloan, Kara

Only thing I didn't enjoy was the spiritual blurred lines, kinda freudian, father/daughter parts. Otherwise it felt a lot like a lazy river that takes its time, punctuated with small waterslides into the next pool.

This is profound and more than a little offbeat told with very carefully constructed language.

Pure Colour A Novel

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