3. Purity
Rating: ☆☆☆☆
Recommended by:
Author: Jonathan Franzen
Genre: Fiction
Info: 608 pages, published September 1, 2015
Format: Audio Book
Summary
Purity is the name of the book’s title character, who is also known as Pip. When we first meet Pip she is living in a crowded Oakland house under the burden of colossal college debt. She soon becomes involved in “The Sunlight Project,” a WikiLeaks-style group headquartered in a South American rain forest that seeks to uncover secrets and expose them on the web.
Run by the charismatic Andreas Wolf, who grew up in socialist East Germany, the Sunlight Project becomes the jumping-off point of discovery for Pip. In addition to the main character, the book’s title Purity refers to the desired goal of every character.
Quotes
“Everyone thinks they have strict limits,” she said, “until they cross them.”
“There’s the imperative to keep secrets, and the imperative to have them known. How do you know that you’re a person, distinct from other people? By keeping certain things to yourself.”
“It’s like having one red sock in a load of white laundry. One red sock, and nothing is ever white again.”
“The world was overpopulated with talkers and underpopulated by listeners.”
“I’m starting to think paradise isn’t eternal contentment. It’s more like there’s something eternal about feeling contented. There’s no such thing as eternal life, because you’re never going to outrun time, but you can still escape time if you’re contented, because then time doesn’t matter.”
“The aim of the Internet and its associated technologies was to “liberate” humanity from the tasks—making things, learning things, remembering things—that had previously given meaning to life and thus had constituted life. Now it seemed as if the only task that meant anything was search-engine optimization.”
My Take
I had previously read, and mostly enjoyed, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, which won the 2001 National Book Award. Franzen is a gifted writer and can tell a compelling tale.
In Purity, Franzen creates a set of disparate characters with interesting back stories and then weaves their stories together in a topical and fascinating story.
