Purity

A Novel

De: Jonathan Franzen

Narrado por: Jenna Lamia, Dylan Baker, Robert Petkoff

"[Jenna Lamia's, Dylan Baker's, and Robert Petkoff's] performances are uniformly engaging and engrossing; together, they make the listening time fly by." —AudioFile (Earphones Award winner)

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW Notable Book

“So funny, so sage and above all so incandescently intelligent” (The Chicago Tribune), the New York Times bestseller Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder, a daring and penetrating book from “the most intelligent novelist of [his] generation” (The New Republic), Jonathan Franzen, the author of Crossroads

Young 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.

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. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn’t understand, and she is equally conflicted about her attraction to him.

The author of The Corrections and Freedom has imagined a world of vividly original characters, and he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as ancient as the war between the sexes.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

You'll love the writing and weirdos

A really well written book, good story and a quirky cast of nicely developed characters. I wanted to dismiss it, initially, but became addicted to it.

So Disappointed After Reading His Other Books

I went on a Franzen binge ordering The Corrections, Crossroads and Freedom and was super excited about diving into another. Early into listening I began to lose excitement. I felt like Purity was written by another author. Purity held none of the tightly woven writing as the previous three I enjoyed. I'm writing this review as I half listen to the last hour waiting for it to be over. I went online to find out what order Franzen's books were written and now that I know I'm no longer interested in ordering the earlier books. I could very well be missing a good book but I'm so disappointed by Purity I think I'll move on to another author. Still a big fan of Franzen and waiting for his next book.

Disappointing at best

The overall arc of the story has a quiet uneventful end without much insight. Huge amounts of time spent in character back stories some of which are more interesting than the main plot line. Annoyingly lengthy metaphors which are neither well written nor useful for the novel. It is as if the author wants you to notice some tricks he's learned and wants to show off but doesn't realize the audience is not impressed.

I wanted to like some of the characters but in the end felt no connection or emotion to any of them.

If this is the next great American writer ... Perhaps this was just his rough draft and the final version will be much better.

Patience for Purity

Fantastic performance. Especially Jenna Lamia- I will listen to anything she has done.

Slow burner to the plot, but worth the journey.

Wow. Every dream of reading realised

Pure joy, intrigue, mind-opening and intelligence. Utterly human and real.
You'll have to give it a try.