Purity

Complex themes are dealt in deeper ways with every new book Franzen writes. Like The Corrections or Freedom--which are his most famous works--Purity still has family in its heart, but there's much more: it's got a more complicated plot than his usual works, it deals with the internet, the notion of purity; it deals with secrets and why they are important; it deals with identity; it deals with fame and feminism, too.It's a heavy book with dense and complicated characters. It's easily one of Franzen's best works to date.

ITS NOT DECENT. DISGUSTING.STOPPED READING. ONE HAS TO BE A SEX ADDICT TO WRITE LIKE TIS.

Touting it as a magnum opus for our morally complex times may hurt the book more than define its true nature, yet Purity by Jonathan Franzen written in his standard pop-literary tone is an enjoyable, often luminous and at times absurb novel. In Purity, author Jonathan Franzen crafted a sweeping story about Purity (Pip) Tylerand her quest for her father which is painted on a canvas of dysfunctional family, abuse and the struggle between genders, generations and political systems. The insights he offered and the commentary of the events are significant, and simply relevant. And the result is Purity, a story about a young girl and her parents which is opinionated, humorous, and compelling.Jonathan Franzen’s story of a 23-year-old Pip who was raised by a single mom in the backwoods of Northern California is dark and complicated. Pip lives with the burden of paying off her college debt which stands at a staggering $130,000. The only way out apparently is to ask his dad to help. But there’s a snag, and that is no small one. She does not know who he is and her mother is unwilling to part with her secret. And it is her quest for her father which takes her to Bolivia on an internship with the Sunlight Project, led by a German activist named Andreas Wolf.From Bolivia Pip traveled to Denver to work for Tom Aberant, an American journalist who runs an online investigative journalism site from his home in Denver where he lives with his fellow journalist Leila Helou. Pip is supposed to work for Tom, but in actuality she is sent to spy on Tom’s work, an online investigative magazine. The book is also filled with side and back stories. Unexpectedly, there is a murder around which the story revolves too.And there is a romantic comedy which will lighten the hearts of many readers. Purity offers a lot of insights into the dynamics of relationship, be it between the opposite sexes or members of the same family. While the book is huge enough, what makes me believe the pages were whittled down was the gnawing feeling that the ending was a bit rushed, though there was no missing piece in the puzzle. All in all, Purity is a well crafted book, superbly plotted, emotionally engaging, intelligently stimulating and inhabited by characters who will linger on long after the story is finished.

It started well and then really dragged.

Bought this book with great expectations, so boring, so dragging and so long....I have read much better books with similar plots.

Um dos melhores contemporaneos, Franzen tem uma crítica sagaz sobre nossa sociedade, e nos faz entrar nos personagens como poucos. Vale a leitura, mas Freedom ainda é meu preferido.

What a great story! There are not many authors out there who know that much about human relationships. I enjoyed every character and the interesting settings but mostly Franzen's wisdom.

Fascinating story. Happy and sad at the same time. Complex yet very simple. It is my first book by Franzen. He writes in a very modern fashion. Very much in the moment. Very contemporary and journalistic in a way. Very entertaining. A must read. I will get more of his books.

Both great and unbearable. Brilliant at times and overwhelmingly long and repetitive at other times. Had to skip entire sections. Loved other sections though.

The primary theme in Franzen's new hefty novel is so clear and crisp that it swept me along with the plot, which is no small matter, as the plot is exciting and suspenseful. There are several overlapping themes, actually, but the polestar, in my perception, was about the duality of man, and how it antagonizes any presumption of moral absolution. The duality is demonstrated in many forms--literal and metaphorical.Moral absolutism, as ironically wielded with the title "purity," was a philosophy of the Soviet State; one of the five main characters, perhaps the cardinal character, Andreas Wolf, grew up in Soviet Germany. Franzen illuminates sharply that when a population is forced to subjugate individualism to the Communist State, that these repressed feelings have to go somewhere. Intelligent people and outliers with rebellious natures are likely to act out their subversion in some way.Andreas Wolf, a brilliant individual and the son of privileged communist parents, struggles with a duality that never ceases, provoked by the Communist rule and his mother's rule at home. His repression and subsequent rebellion is key to the unfolding of the story. His mother, an intellectual and academic, has been the most poignant influence on his life, and has caused the most pain, but he sublimates his feelings about his mother, and the Soviet Mother, until he can't. When the Wall comes down, he becomes a celebrity icon and eventually a rival to Julian Assange, the Wiki leaks iconoclast.Now, it is the Internet that is the instrument of totalitarianism. The Internet's aim was to "liberate" humanity from the task of making things, learning things, or even remembering them. What had previously given meaning to life had been taken over by the Internet. And the Internet is now the formidable place for duality to flourish-- everyone can have an avatar, or present a different face to the public."Who even cared about what a person's private thoughts about him were? Private thoughts didn't exist in the retrievable, disseminable, and readable way that data did. And since a person couldn't exist in two places at once, the more he existed as the Internet's image of him, the less he felt like he existed as a flesh-and-blood person. The internet meant death..."Andreas also has some toxic secrets that could derail him at any moment. "There's the imperative to keep secrets, and the imperative to have them known...Sooner or later, the inside of you needs a witness."There's Pip Tyler, the comely 20-something year-old with a $130,000 student debt, who literally doesn't know her origins--her real birth date, who her father is, or her mother's real name. She has been begging her mother her entire life to tell her, only to be shut down. Her adult quest in life is to find out the truth of who she is, and to find her father. In essence, she has been living a dual existence--the legitimate person she was born as is hidden away in her mother's secret compartment of sorts, and Pip is stuck with the lie. Her relationship with her mother is a mixture of love and resentment. She is currently adrift in aimless jobs and a dead-end life. When she gets an offer from Andreas Wolf to work for him up at his cult-ish nerd center in Bolivia, she is intrigued.Then there are Denver journalists Tom Aberrant, and his still-married long-term lover, Leila Helou, who, although not altogether against Internet journalism, still believe in the purity of boots-to-the-ground journalism. As we go back to details of Tom's early years with his ex-wife, Anabel, we are introduced to possibly the most entertainingly dysfunctional couple since anything that Philip Roth ever described. Anabel's moral absolutism, her insistence on a singular way of art and poverty, was a burden that Tom could neither live with or escape. Leila's husband Charles, the failed writer, keeps Leila tethered to him, also.Franzen mostly leaves the final dissections of character up to the reader, but there's no lack of ongoing paradoxes to explore human nature. "And so I had to keep working with her to help her understand why I couldn't keep working with her." Our inner contradictions and the dark parts of ourselves that wreak havoc on our lives are examined through our strengths that give way to our fallibility, and our fallibility that gives way to our strengths. Every character plays the Purity card in one way or another, but it is the Blemish one that keeps making them all so human.Although the themes are what make the story so tantalizing, Franzen also creates a combination domestic drama and thriller. Like a Venn diagram, the characters overlap and also circle each other throughout the novel. It is divided up into sections, and its non-linear construction works to intensify the drama at hand. Eventually, a seamless narrative is completed, one that is bittersweet and credible.