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Pure

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Publisher
Europa Editions
Date
Award Winners
Fiction
Historical
Literary
Winner of the Costa Book Award

Jean-Baptiste Baratte–an ambitious young engineer of modest origin–arrives in Paris in 1785, charged by the King's minister with emptying the overflowing cemetery of Les Innocents, an ancient site whose stench is poisoning the neighborhood's air and water.

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Positive
Based on 8 reviews

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What The Reviewers Say
Rave
The New York Times
This inventive and surprising novel is set in Paris in 1785, four years before the Revolution, and its protagonist, a young engineer named Jean-Baptiste Baratte, is more like James Dyer [of Ingenious Pain] than like Casanova [of Casanova in Love]. He thinks of himself as a man of the Enlightenment and a student of Voltaire, a rationalist and a freethinker who believes above all in the power of reason … What keeps the novel from flying off into allegory is its extraordinary descriptiveness. Pure is grounded in the physical world, which it records with great particularity … It’s elegantly written and intricately constructed, with an ending that, like those mirrors at Versailles, cleverly reflects the beginning. And yet for all its neatness, Pure is ultimately a book about impurity, what Baratte comes to recognize as ‘the world’s fabulous dirt.’ It’s an artful, carefully wrought novel that ultimately comes down in favor of mess.
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Positive
The New York Times Sunday Book Review
A novel of ideas disguised as a ghost story, voluptuously atmospheric, Pure exerts a sensual hold over the reader … Now a subterranean wall separating the necropolis from the city of the living has collapsed, and an effluvium of putrefaction is penetrating the dwellings around the cemetery, extinguishing candles, tainting food and even precipitating ‘moral disturbances, particularly among the young.’ For the author’s purposes, cleaning up the mess is a metaphor grand enough to accommodate an existential battle between dark and light, outmoded and enlightened, decay and purity … Miller’s gift for characterization and ability to summon up a world that convinces absolutely, even though it never was.
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Positive
The Washington Post
Into this pungent historical setting wafts Miller with a grave story about a man charged with emptying the cemetery and tearing down the church. It’s Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth in reverse. Miller’s hero, Jean-Baptiste Baratte, is a work of fiction, but the 1785 country Miller describes is redolent of real life … Jean-Baptiste is an endearing fellow, serious and earnest, torn between his ambitions and his good nature. He’s so committed to rational self-improvement that every night in bed he recites a little godless affirmation about his devotion to reason. He prides himself ‘on possessing a trained and shadowless mind,’ but just wait till the miasma of the graveyard begins to work on him. Not exactly a country bumpkin, he’s still dazzled by Paris. The early scenes of him stumbling around the city — trying to buy the right suit, trying to hold his liquor — are delightful.
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