Purity is at its most coldly satisfying when Andrzej Tichý’s prose is at its most unexpurgated. The protagonists of the 11 stories that comprise this Czech-born, Swedish-raised writer’s second book sometimes have their situations outlined in third-person omniscient form – such as the woman in ‘The Runaway’, PTSD-afflicted and sectioned. More often, we are treated to interior monologues as rambling and sickly as yours or mine, or the grammatical imperfections of interpersonal chatter as it really unfolds. Here, what these characters are saying is made more impactful by how they say it.
What they are saying is also invariably grotesque, grubby or antisocial, these being Tichý’s default settings – Wretchedness, his debut novel from 2020, is based around the thought patterns of a classical musician but reaches back into memories of his troubled adolescence. Purity seems to enjoy exploring the fissures which form between lines of social class: the narrator of ‘The Usual Thoughts’ has a literary critic brother and a father with a prolonged drink problem and a past spent in doss-houses. A kleptomaniac, while being questioned about a robbery, will knot themselves up like a pretzel justifying – to us, the readers – their habit by quoting Proudhon and invoking Jesus.
At their most unsettling, these stories – ranging in length from less than three pages to more than 60 – approach the alluring psychodramas of Dennis Cooper. In ‘Strength And Unity’, we hear the testimony of a man imprisoned and tortured by a friend, Karl, in the latter’s flat; ultimately, it transpires the victim is recounting this from the afterlife. None of Tichý’s switches between tenses or narrative voices, of which there are many, diminish his unusually astute eye and ear for social realism.
Purity, Andrzej Tichý [trans. Nichola Smalley] (And Other Stories)
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words NOEL GARDNER