Perhaps it is an ideal people struggle for but never attain.

The title suggests purity, but there is little of that in the book. What it is actually about is not very clear to me. This was a great read, and as I am new to Franzen certainly an encouragement to read more of his work. Purity is the most daring and penetrating book yet by one of the major writers of our time. 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. Jonathan Franzen’s Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder. 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. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur who rose to fame in the chaos following the fall of the Berlin Wall. 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.

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.Įnter the Germans. 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. The Sunday Times bestseller from the author of Freedom and The Corrections

Purity jonathan