Purity - by Andrzej Tichý (Paperback)

About the Book

"The stories in Purity take the reader through cities and suburbs, apartments and streets, to find characters struggling to survive in modern society: a man has an outburst on a bus; a fugitive finds insight in a colour wheel; a social realist kills his friend with a hammer; a thief finds himself in books. And cleaners reluctantly go on cleaning."--

Book Synopsis

2021 Nordic Council Literature Prize Finalist
The stories in Purity take the reader through cities and suburbs, apartments and streets, to find characters struggling to survive in modern society: a man has an outburst on a bus; a fugitive finds insight in a color wheel; a social realist kills his friend with a hammer; a thief finds himself in books. And cleaners reluctantly go on cleaning.
With gravity and humor, against the backdrop of a violent civilization, people are depicted as fallen, or waiting to fall, rendered by Tichý with the fury, compassion and emotional complexity of Kendrick Lamar.

Review Quotes

"What Tichý's written--it's a great collection of stories as well as a lucid and biting political commentary on the rough position of current migrants to Sweden--is also a manifesto against the strictures placed upon the narratorial voice and the tie between narrator and author, created by 'the hacks and essayists' of '[our] reality' and reinforced by the recent prominence of autofictions and literary obsession with 'identity.'" --Jonah Howell, The Rumpus
"Do you enjoy your short fiction with bleak imagery, unsettling twists, and characters discovering their capacity for antisocial behavior? Welcome to Andrzej Tichý's Purity, then." --Tobias Carroll, Words without Borders

"Tichý describes disturbing incidents with bracing candor. Taken together, these stories form an unforgettable tableau of life on the edge." --Publishers Weekly
"A dizzying look inside the heads of people at the margins." --Kirkus Reviews
"These are nimble stories, nauseating and discordant, that shuffle your feelings and loyalties as you read them." --Sarah Gale, Literary Review

"Purity is a strong and literary challenging book, emotionally charged, intricate and ceaselessly fascinating, poetic and tender, even in its dark way humouristic, through all its roughness, deep grief, blood and grime." --Aftonbladet
"When Tichý combines his concrete social realism with falling in to hypnotic flow of consciousness, it become completely brilliant. As sharp as Tichý depicts the pain, he also writes of an interpersonal tenderness and love. And a powerful resistance." --Göteborgs-Posten
"A feverish kind of despair about the eternal machine of abuse of power thrusts Tichý's disparate voices into an affecting whole." --Svenska Dagbladet
"As in all his best books, Tichý is an entertainer. Funny and drastic. Smart and tough. Never letting the tragedy become comedy. It is the style, between elegant novel prose and the colloquial, that lends the fragmentary stories a glimpse of something almost cheerful; the laughter when, staring into the abyss, you realise it is staring right back at you." --Expressen
"How something can be so powerful and precise at the same time is hard to comprehend. But as a depiction of man's conditions on society's wage lowering labour market, it is brilliant. The truth is that prose is rarely as refined as this." --Dagens Nyheter

Praise for Wretchedness

"The polyphony of voices is tightly interwoven . . . arranged into a narrative resembling a complex musical composition . . . The book ends abruptly, as an avant-garde piece of music might, but the vibrations continue to fill the air."⁠--Anna Aslanyan, The Guardian


"Visceral . . . a fascinating read, the real-life details of which further bolster the fiction . . . This is nightmarish, impressionistic literature whose disjointed sentences have an associative flow that accumulates to a shocking whole." ⁠--Sarah Gilmartin, Irish Times



"There is a kind of unholy music in this powerful, punchy, perceptive novel."⁠--Eithne Farry, Daily Mail



"A blurry tornado of voices and timelines, this short novel unspools over eight paragraphs of run-on sentences swirling around the memories of a cellist raised on an estate outside Malmö . . . the novel builds to an unexpectedly heart-stopping . . . finale, with a frame-breaking time-slip that invites us to reconsider everything we've just read as a stylistically radical expression of survivor's guilt."--Anthony Cummins, Book of the Day The Observer



"Wretchedness is a social novel whose descent into hardship is haunting, and whose lead character is an example of the hazy line between surviving a lifestyle or falling prey to it." ⁠--Foreword Reviews


"Graphic depictions of crime, racism, poverty, drug use and violence are rendered through paragraph-free slabs of text that propulsively veer between voices and minds, times and locations. As well as the Swedish estates, the novel draws on Tichý's experiences of living in Hamburg and London to paint a picture of a pan-European community of the excluded passing through squats, underground clubs, petty scams and cash-only employment. [...] Tichý's early creative life centered on music and there is a sense of musicality inherent Wretchedness." ⁠--Nicholas Wroe, Guardian



"An inventive, linguistically adept experiment."⁠--Kirkus Reviews



"An utterly phenomenal read: a masterclass in hyper-modernist experimentation, voice and form. Embracing the bitter realities of addiction, prejudice and inner-city turmoil, Tichý's rapid prose roves internal dialogues, places, vernaculars and circumstances to expose a singular, absorbed world struggling to keep itself afloat. Through a complex network of characters, friends and strangers we're made to think about the ways the human spirit can fall into despair, its ability to establish resolve, to love and remember, and the myriad philosophies it leaves us with.⁠"--Anthony Anaxagorou



"What can a survivor do with their history? Can you be loyal to the friends you left behind? Andrzej Tichy´ turns this wretched reality into something poignant. His polyphonic novel has a rough, rhythmic melody and a ferocious rage."⁠--August Prize Judges



"Tichý writes a delirious, detailed prose, studded with Malmö slang and contemporary verve. The language pours forth over the pages like a contaminated river, full of filth, despair and anxiety, an associative flow of long, disjointed, almost endless sentences." ⁠--Eva Johansson, Svenska Dagbladet



"Wretchedness is a wild intoxicant of language, momentum, and voice. Andrzej Tichý is a master of despair." ⁠--Patrick Cottrell



"Some kind of holy/unholy meeting of Thomas Bernhard and The Geto Boys, Wretchedness is an anguished, brutal, beautiful piece of phantasmagoric-realism, an act of remembrance through imagination, animated by rhythm, and pouring past you with the inevitability of the tide coming in. Brilliantly written, superbly translated, this small book packs in more sadness and moments of epiphany, more hopelessness and hope, more surviving - more life! - than most writers manage in a whole career. Remarkable." ⁠--Will Ashon



"The past is so close behind in Nichola Smalley's translation of Tichý's precise maelstrom of memory, music and survival - on the margins of this and every city - that you can smell the chemicals on its breath. There's nothing to lose and too much to lose; no escape and all our escapes. Keep going. Read it and be thankful for Andrzej Tichý." ⁠--Tony White



"A bravura, urgent head-trip of a novel, replete with compassion, rage, and gimlet-eyed observation on every page. Essential reading - us English-speakers are lucky to have Tichý's work available in translation at last." ⁠--Luke Kennard



"A powerful, voice-driven novel that remains in the mind long after the final page. Tichý brings everything to life: circumstances and people we'd rather ignore, with a flow resembling music." ⁠--Derek Owusu



"The pleasures of this book are immediate, brilliant and deeply unreasonable. Every person and every thought is intensely present. It demeans nothing." ⁠--Caleb Klaces



"Wretchedness is a red-blooded ode to the most invisible and unwanted in society - immigrant workers, the homeless, addicts, and those born into the hardest of circumstances. Tichý's gasping, polyphonic prose flies through time and space and drug-induced states, flinging us between disturbing recollections, hopeless presents, and deferred or tainted futures - all connected by bittersour camaraderies and the remedying power of music." ⁠--Jen Calleja

About the Author

Andrzej Tichý (b. 1978) was born in Prague to a Polish mother and a Czech father and has lived in Sweden since 1981. He is the author of five novels, a story collection and a wide range of nonfiction and criticism. Tichý has received critical acclaim for his work, and is widely recognized as one of the most important novelists of his generation. His novel Wretchedness, a post-political foray into modern day Swedish society, won the 2021 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize, and was longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize and shortlisted for the 2021 Bernard Shaw Prize. His latest short story collection Purity was nominated for the Nordic Council Literary Prize.
Nichola Smalley is a translator of Swedish and Norwegian literature. Her translation of Andrzej Tichý's novel Wretchedness won the 2021 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize, and was longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize and shortlisted for the 2021 Bernard Shaw Prize. She has a PhD in the use of slang in contemporary Swedish and English literature.