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Loading... Pure (original 2011; edition 2012)by Andrew Miller
Work InformationPure by Andrew Miller (2011)
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Flowers bloom again in the disinterred cemetery. Sunlight illuminates the darkness through the broken roof of the church. Though progress brings suffering and death, the balance, as Baratte knows, "will still be in your favour". As Miller proves with this dazzling novel, it is not certainty we need but courage, now as much as ever, before we too are reduced to bones. Purifying centuries of decaying mortality and removing the miasma that permeates the dwellings, skin and even food of the area is neither simple nor necessarily popular. Miller threads into this fabric subtle ideas about modernity, glancing at Voltaire, public health and the seditious graffiti that anticipate the revolutionary fervour of 1789 - just four years away. AwardsDistinctions
Deep in the heart of Paris, its oldest cemetery is, by 1785, overflowing, tainting the very breath of those who live nearby. Into their midst comes Jean-Baptiste Baratte, a young, provincial engineer charged by the king with demolishing it. At first Baratte sees this as a chance to clear the burden of history, a fitting task for a modern man of reason. But before long, he begins to suspect that the destruction of the cemetery might be a prelude to his own. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.92Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 2000-LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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Miller conjures a vivid picture of the daily round in this little part of eighteenth century Paris: the smells, whether of sour breath or rotting vegetables or a dusty church; and of a world about to change, in the destruction of the cemetery and church which has for so long been at the heart of the community Baratte finds himself in. Violence and death are ever present.
Unsettled by the narrative, the reader is left with an impression of a world about to change, a world which is already changing in ways its citizens cannot comprehend. Uncertainty is what draws the reader in.
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