The Wonders of Grief and Becoming a Leaf (with your dead father). Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour for 4Columns

You might think that by starting a review like this that I hate the book: “In Sheila Heti’s new novel, Pure Colour, the writing is warm, deft, and strange, but the characters are thin and the plot is too.” Wrong. I love it. The review continues: “What plot do you need, though, when the world is ending and God’s “first draft,” as she puts it here, failing? For the world Heti limns is a place of climate grief: ‘Seasons had become postmodern. . . . New things to die of were being added each day. We were angry all the time.’” The grief here is also in losing a parent, and Heti writes profoundly. Her character’s grief is deeply psychedelic and captures how we bend time and space to be with our dead beloveds. (I relate to this more than I should, perhaps. I think my mom lives now in a plant on my kitchen counter.) as the main character turns into a leaf… (read more at 4Columns )