Purity
Books | Fiction / Literary
3.8
(136)
Jonathan Franzen
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERA NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW Notable Book“So funny, so sage and above all so incandescently intelligent” (The Chicago Tribune), the New York Times bestseller Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder, a daring and penetrating book from “the most intelligent novelist of [his] generation” (The New Republic), Jonathan Franzen 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.
AD
Buy now:
More Details:
Author
Jonathan Franzen
Pages
576
Publisher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published Date
2015-09-01
ISBN
0374710740 9780374710743
Ratings
Google: 2.5
Community ReviewsSee all
"I started reading Purity about ten years ago when it came out, and I give up pretty soon because I didn't really care for the main characters (in hindsight mainly because the Dutch translation is very bad and lackluster). After reading all his other books I felt it was time to read Purity again (this time in its original language) and to finish it.<br/><br/>The story revolves around Pip: a troubled young woman that tries to fill the emptiness of not knowing her father by trying to please her ideological mother by becoming an activist herself. She gets pulled into some sort of hacking cult led by the famous Asange-like but much less ethical Andreas Wolf. Andreas is a very troubled man himself as well, and this leads to a thrilleresque novel about secrets, loyalty and boundaries. <br/><br/>At first I really didn't like this book. The characters started off two-dimensional and it felt like Franzen was struggling to find the correct tone to talk about sex (there's a lot of sex, or better said, a lot of almost sex) without sounding off putting. From the moment Pip met Andreas I started to enjoy the story. Unfortunately I lost interest when the book was trying to be more exciting, and the characters turned out to be quite extreme personalities, almost like caricatures. <br/><br/>Another problem that I have with this book is that this whole book tends to have a misogynistic undertone: the female characters all have flaws that people associate with women, like fluctuating emotions, passive aggression, jealousy, a lack of rational thinking, and not being straightforward. The male characters are heartless, cold psychopaths, and all of them are successful.<br/><br/>I really really enjoy Franzen. He's one of the most talented writers when it comes to describing nuanced and relatable characters. Unfortunately that talent was lost in this book. To be honest: with three stars, I'm being generous."
Lisa Mallinckrodt
"Love Franzen"
N H
Natalie Huneault
"Character development "
E G
Ellen Gaudreau
