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Purity: A Novel - Jonathan Franzen
Purity: A Novel
by: (author)
3.63 20
A magnum opus for our morally complex times from the author of FreedomYoung 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... show more
A magnum opus for our morally complex times from the author of FreedomYoung 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.
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Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 9780374239213 (0374239215)
ASIN: 0374239215
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Pages no: 576
Edition language: English
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Community Reviews
XOX
XOX rated it
0.5 How a young selfish bitch gets through life
Oh crap. I dislike Purity and I just past the 50 pages markWhat a twat? Purity or Pip is a bitch. A young selfish stupid bitch. I bought this book to get out of the genre. This is as close to literature and I dislike the main character, a lot. Let see what she did in the first 50 pages. W...
Cynically Speaking
Cynically Speaking rated it
5.0
There are many forms of purity - Mind, Heart, Soul, etc...and most of the characters ruin the 'purity' of those they love, whether intentional or not. Mr. Franzen creates great characters and his prose is fantastic. I never felt he hurried anything nor did I want him to. I just kept reading. Nea...
KatieMc
KatieMc rated it
1.5 a big letdown, and that's starting with deflated hopes
In the end, it was a good story. Unfortunately, it was overplayed by characters who all had mommy and daddy issues. It turned feminism into a joke which is rather unfortunate because it's fodder for the MRA types out there. It makes me sad because I have really liked reading Franzen in the past and ...
Kaethe
Kaethe rated it
0.0 Purity: A Novel
"I have to acknowledge the possibility that I’m simply a horrible person.” Jonathan Franzen in Financial Times interview.
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