The lightness of Purity
I wrote about the darkness of suppression of a totalitarian regime and how that influences the lives of people, when I discussed The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes and Jonathan Doerr’s All The Light We Can Not See.
Purity by Jonathan Franzen is the third book I recently read that is dominated by the totalitarian overcast. In this case, the dictatorship is the DDR, East Germany, during the Iron Curtain era.
In long descriptive sections, we learn how Andreas grew up under the suppression of the DDR. He became a critic of the regime, and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he started an organization like WikiLeaks. But his personality was damaged for good, and the organization became an instrument for expressing his grandiosity.
“Well, you say you’re about citizen journalism. You’re supposedly in the business of leaks. But isn’t your real business—” “Cow manure?” “I was going to say fame and adulation. The product is you.”
Andreas is unable to shake off this state of mind. He keeps feeling unsafe, haunted, and unable to be happy. We have also seen this state of mind in The Noise of Time and All the Light We Can Not See. When his girlfriend turns him down and leaves him, his madness takes disastrous forms.
He’d never experienced grief like this. It seemed as if he really loved her after all. Grief passed, however. Before he was even home again, he could see his future. He would never again make the mistake of trying to live with a woman. For whatever reason (probably his childhood), he wasn’t suited for it, and the strong thing to do was to accept this. His computer had made a weakling of him. He also had a vague, shameful memory of climbing onto Annagret’s lap and trying to be her baby. Weak! Weak! But now his mother, with her meddling, had given him the pretext he needed to be free of both her and Annagret. A double deus ex machina—the good luck of a man fated to dominate.
Thus, he reaches a megalomaniac mindset, convinced that the world and everyone revolve around him. This contrasts massively with Pip (Purity), the second protagonist in the story.
Both of them grew up under the burden of a very dominant mother. Purity is betrayed by her parents. She finds out about that but refuses to blame them for anything. Andreas, however, escapes, leaves his mother behind, and is unable to forgive and take responsibility for his own life.
In contrast to Andreas’s self-destructive conclusion, Purity can reconcile with her past. She faces her mother, forgives her parents for what they have done to her, and even arranges to settle her mother’s problems.
rr
