Scan barcode
rhl98's review against another edition
3.0
An interesting read until the end, which I’m sure was meant to bear some significance, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out was that was (and upon reading reviews it appears I’m not alone in that). Otherwise an interesting read.
cottage_witch's review against another edition
dark
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
It was possibly one of the worst books I've had to power through reading. It is so slow and the plot is difficult to understand. Most of the characters are completely unlikeable and have little development. However, once reading over it again I was able to find a bit more depth in the story and more insight into the characters and the cemetery did end up interesting me quite a bit.
csw217's review against another edition
3.0
The story was super interesting, but the protagonist was not likeable and irritatingly insecure, parts of the story made no sense (the attacks by Ziguette and on Jeanne… why?), and there was an ickiness to every aspect of it that made it a tough read at times. The ending also was a bit much.
patsmith139's review against another edition
4.0
When I look back not a great deal happened but the superb characterisation was compelling reading and I liked the way the author changed styles after a momentous event had a profound effect on the main character. The historical detail was excellent.
paul56's review against another edition
challenging
dark
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.75
stephwd's review against another edition
5.0
So I have been feeling rather mean recently. As I looked back at my reviews, I suddenly realised I had not given a single 5 star rating all year and started to think I was being a bit judgmental. After all, who am I to judge? If I could write even a 1 star worthy book I wouldn't be sat in my study interspersing A Level marking with writing a blog. However, just as I began to think this, along came 'Pure' and made me think 'Oh yeah, yeah that's what five stars sounds like. That's what I've been waiting for. THAT is amazing.'
'Pure' is a dark and disturbing gothic historical novel that deals with the darkest aspects of human existence (both emotionally and literally). It tells the story of Jean Baptiste Barratte, a young engineer, who has high aspirations when he is called to the Palace of Versailles to undertake a job in the name of the king. However, that job is the destruction of Les Innocents, one of the oldest cemeteries in Paris that has become so clogged with human detritus that the corpses have begun spilling out from the ground itself like a skeletal army and the stench infects everything around it perhaps even intoxicating the human brain with its pungent evil. Sucked into the pores of living flesh and poisoning the very food they eat, nothing seems immune to its impurities. Thus at the start of 1785, Barratte begins the unforgiving task of destroying the place and transporting the bodies to a new abode where they will finish the process of decay that they have already embarked upon. With the help of a group of disparate miners who seem to have their own laws and means of communication and seeing the world, Barrate attempts to survive the unholy task. However, whether it will manage to cleanse the ground and end the putrefaction or whether he will be the final body to join those that leave Les Innocents remains to be seen.
This is a macabre novel of the highest quality. I read Miller's 'Ingenious Pain' last year, which was also superb, but this is even better as the effects that he creates in only a few of the chapters in that (his first novel) are maintained and heightened in this, his sixth. Miller's descriptive powers are utterly chilling: he describes 'prying coffins open like oysters' and there is something truly repellent about the task he forces his protagonist to undertake. Yet at the same time, the reader is fascinated. This is not the product of a disturbed mind however. It is what genuinely occurred! Worse still, and what Miller does not mention in his novel (perhaps actually sparing us some of the most repugnant details) is that, in reality, when the bodies were exhumed and found to have decomposed into margaric acid, this remaining body fat was actually used to make soap and candles for the discerning citizens of Paris! Yet as Kira Cochrane writing for the Guardian points out, 'Part of the joy of the novel is its fleshiness, bone crunch, gristly, meaty, stinking metaphors, its rich sense of the human body as both abstraction and animal entity.'
Yet whilst this is a novel about death, it is also a novel about life and this novel teems with life in all its sensuality: its depiction of Parisian inhabitants bustling through the streets; its creation of gluttonous feasts; the way its characters cling to the hope love offers in the very gloom of the night time grave robbing; and the revolutionary hum that murmurs beneath the city's melee of people (this is, after all, 1785, but 4 years before the devastating bloodshed wrought by the French Revolution.) And there is an important connection in this as Miller himself has pointed out in his claim that he was fascinated by the events surrounding the cemetery's removal and the authorities attempts to erase the past just as the revolution did.
What is more, Miller is a real wordsmith: there is a poetic beauty to his prose even when he is describing the desecration of a cemetery. He describes Barratte's return to his home as follows: 'Home for the first time in 11 weeks though in his heart it might easily be 11 years, himself a grizzled Ulysses strolling his eyes for the blue shadow of Ithaca' - beautifully evocative.
His sense of place is also impressive. I could imagine Paris of 1785 in lurid detail at times and particularly the cemetery, which has always held a morbid fascination for me partly due to an April afternoon spent wandering the streets of Montmatre Cemetery with Maupassant's 'A Graveyard Sisterhood' in mind (another story that combines sex and death although to very different effect) and partly due to the many years spent reading Rice's vampire chronicles (this was the location of Armand's coven where Lestat first discovers him).
This is a novel that is far less about plot and far more about the human condition ironically. It is far less about chilling us to the bone and far more about opening our eyes to the nature of humanity and Miller does this superbly, deftly and imaginatively from the opening pages and the overwhelming opulence of Versailles that juxtaposes the cemetery's bleakness so brilliantly to its closing image of decay on a much wider scale in the shape of an elephant. This is a novel that resonates symbolically and every moment should be savored.
'Pure' is a dark and disturbing gothic historical novel that deals with the darkest aspects of human existence (both emotionally and literally). It tells the story of Jean Baptiste Barratte, a young engineer, who has high aspirations when he is called to the Palace of Versailles to undertake a job in the name of the king. However, that job is the destruction of Les Innocents, one of the oldest cemeteries in Paris that has become so clogged with human detritus that the corpses have begun spilling out from the ground itself like a skeletal army and the stench infects everything around it perhaps even intoxicating the human brain with its pungent evil. Sucked into the pores of living flesh and poisoning the very food they eat, nothing seems immune to its impurities. Thus at the start of 1785, Barratte begins the unforgiving task of destroying the place and transporting the bodies to a new abode where they will finish the process of decay that they have already embarked upon. With the help of a group of disparate miners who seem to have their own laws and means of communication and seeing the world, Barrate attempts to survive the unholy task. However, whether it will manage to cleanse the ground and end the putrefaction or whether he will be the final body to join those that leave Les Innocents remains to be seen.
This is a macabre novel of the highest quality. I read Miller's 'Ingenious Pain' last year, which was also superb, but this is even better as the effects that he creates in only a few of the chapters in that (his first novel) are maintained and heightened in this, his sixth. Miller's descriptive powers are utterly chilling: he describes 'prying coffins open like oysters' and there is something truly repellent about the task he forces his protagonist to undertake. Yet at the same time, the reader is fascinated. This is not the product of a disturbed mind however. It is what genuinely occurred! Worse still, and what Miller does not mention in his novel (perhaps actually sparing us some of the most repugnant details) is that, in reality, when the bodies were exhumed and found to have decomposed into margaric acid, this remaining body fat was actually used to make soap and candles for the discerning citizens of Paris! Yet as Kira Cochrane writing for the Guardian points out, 'Part of the joy of the novel is its fleshiness, bone crunch, gristly, meaty, stinking metaphors, its rich sense of the human body as both abstraction and animal entity.'
Yet whilst this is a novel about death, it is also a novel about life and this novel teems with life in all its sensuality: its depiction of Parisian inhabitants bustling through the streets; its creation of gluttonous feasts; the way its characters cling to the hope love offers in the very gloom of the night time grave robbing; and the revolutionary hum that murmurs beneath the city's melee of people (this is, after all, 1785, but 4 years before the devastating bloodshed wrought by the French Revolution.) And there is an important connection in this as Miller himself has pointed out in his claim that he was fascinated by the events surrounding the cemetery's removal and the authorities attempts to erase the past just as the revolution did.
What is more, Miller is a real wordsmith: there is a poetic beauty to his prose even when he is describing the desecration of a cemetery. He describes Barratte's return to his home as follows: 'Home for the first time in 11 weeks though in his heart it might easily be 11 years, himself a grizzled Ulysses strolling his eyes for the blue shadow of Ithaca' - beautifully evocative.
His sense of place is also impressive. I could imagine Paris of 1785 in lurid detail at times and particularly the cemetery, which has always held a morbid fascination for me partly due to an April afternoon spent wandering the streets of Montmatre Cemetery with Maupassant's 'A Graveyard Sisterhood' in mind (another story that combines sex and death although to very different effect) and partly due to the many years spent reading Rice's vampire chronicles (this was the location of Armand's coven where Lestat first discovers him).
This is a novel that is far less about plot and far more about the human condition ironically. It is far less about chilling us to the bone and far more about opening our eyes to the nature of humanity and Miller does this superbly, deftly and imaginatively from the opening pages and the overwhelming opulence of Versailles that juxtaposes the cemetery's bleakness so brilliantly to its closing image of decay on a much wider scale in the shape of an elephant. This is a novel that resonates symbolically and every moment should be savored.
scruffy's review against another edition
dark
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
4.5
ekurt1's review against another edition
2.0
The only reason that I gave 2 stars instead of 1 is I'm on a good day and I don't want to be meanly subjective. If you like novels about life of the common people in the 18th century in France this might be book for you. Definitely "gripping" then, as declared on the cover. Turns out it is my least favorite thing to read about. Give me the snippy, saucy, good for nothing aristocrats, the life in the palaces and the castles, the abundance and the decadence if I am to read about the past.
One thing though, so many unknown vocabulary in this book. Miller is not sparing with embellished language. It would have been good GRE practice if I looked them up.
One thing though, so many unknown vocabulary in this book. Miller is not sparing with embellished language. It would have been good GRE practice if I looked them up.
tomleetang's review against another edition
3.0
Deliciously macabre, but somehow also insubstantial. I enjoyed the depictions of a Paris overflowing with the dead, where strange acts of violence seem compelled by the corpses of those who are already deceased. And Miller crafts some gorgeous imagery. Yet I also sense that if I'm asked what Pure was about in a couple of weeks, I shall have completely forgotten.
hdbblog's review against another edition
3.0
This is the third book I've read off of my "Genre Novels That Should Be Classics" reading list in a quest to expand my book choices beyond my normal comfort zone. I'm not a big historical fiction reader. Sometimes it makes appearances in my Fantasy or Science Fiction picks, but I never avidly seek it out. That's why I chose to listen to the audio of Pure. Jonathan Aris came highly recommended as a narrator, and I hoped he'd help me immerse myself in Paris circa 1785.
Jean-Baptiste Baratte was an intriguing character. A young man, an engineer, with visions of grand projects flitting across his mind. Imagine his surprise when the first job that he is tasked with, is the destruction of Les Innocents cemetary and its church. I was pulled in by this thought. If this is the only job offered, and you need the work, does it matter that you'll be destroying a piece of history? Unearthing the loved ones of others? Watching Jean-Baptiste struggle with this, following along as he fought his own inner demons, fascinated me.
What was tough for me, were the layers this book contains. Pure is packed to the brim with metaphor and symbolism. It may have been easier for me to soak that all in if I had been reading printed words. Perhaps. Despite Jonathan Aris' excellent narration, I still lost myself at certain points. Jean-Baptiste's thoughts would reach a point where they were so dense, so scattered, that I'd find myself struggling to pay attention. There were high points, and low points, but the ending threw me completely off. I listened to it again, just to make sure I didn't miss something important. I'm still confused.
For a very vividly written Paris backdrop, and a character that I enjoyed, I'll give this a two-star rating. The extra star is for Jonathan Aris' wonderful narration. If you have the opportunity to listen to this on audio, I'd say go for it! My quest continues on!
Jean-Baptiste Baratte was an intriguing character. A young man, an engineer, with visions of grand projects flitting across his mind. Imagine his surprise when the first job that he is tasked with, is the destruction of Les Innocents cemetary and its church. I was pulled in by this thought. If this is the only job offered, and you need the work, does it matter that you'll be destroying a piece of history? Unearthing the loved ones of others? Watching Jean-Baptiste struggle with this, following along as he fought his own inner demons, fascinated me.
What was tough for me, were the layers this book contains. Pure is packed to the brim with metaphor and symbolism. It may have been easier for me to soak that all in if I had been reading printed words. Perhaps. Despite Jonathan Aris' excellent narration, I still lost myself at certain points. Jean-Baptiste's thoughts would reach a point where they were so dense, so scattered, that I'd find myself struggling to pay attention. There were high points, and low points, but the ending threw me completely off. I listened to it again, just to make sure I didn't miss something important. I'm still confused.
For a very vividly written Paris backdrop, and a character that I enjoyed, I'll give this a two-star rating. The extra star is for Jonathan Aris' wonderful narration. If you have the opportunity to listen to this on audio, I'd say go for it! My quest continues on!