A review by samidhak
Pure Colour by Sheila Heti

3.0

The misery of reading an abstract literary novel is that at some point it becomes too abstract and starts to go bonkers. And that is exactly what happened in this one. Mira, our flighty main character - if you can even call her that, is an artist trapped inside her own trauma. She's living in the first draft of God's creation where she has to navigate her growing romantic feelings for a friend while grappling with the death of her father. The first 130 pages are truly golden. I loved how Heti describes Mira's time in a lamp shop and then later the jewellery shop; the narration is almost like direction in a movie.

The second part is heavily focused on the father-daughter relationship. Mira goes through a spiritual metamorphosis in which her father's soul coalesces with her own and together they inhabit a leaf. Initially I thought it was beautiful, but after about 50 pages of her meandering around the world as a leaf I started to loose the metaphor. And since that point the book went downhill for me. Passages would swap between Annie and her dad's death and the timelines shrunk to become more confusing.

I think it was a strong start and concept, but lacked the same complexity in its finish. Even though its a short read the philosophical concepts became too abstract to follow.