Purity

Reviews / Votes

'Purity is a strong, challenging book, emotionally charged, intricate and ceaselessly fascinating, poetic and tender, even humorous in its dark way, through all its roughness, deep grief, blood and grime.' Aftonbladet 'When Tichy combines his concrete social realism with a slip into hypnotic stream of consciousness, it become completely brilliant. Tichy writes interpersonal tenderness and love just as sharply as he depicts pain, and powerful resistance.' Goeteborgs-Posten 'A feverish kind of despair about the eternal machine that is the abuse of power thrusts Tichy's disparate voices into an affecting whole.' Svenska Dagbladet 'As in all his best books, Tichy is an entertainer. Funny and drastic, smart and tough, without ever letting the tragedy become comedy. It is the style, between elegant novelistic prose and the colloquial, that lends these fragmentary stories a glint 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 simultaneously so powerful and so precise is hard to comprehend. But as a depiction of human existence in today's evermore precarious labour market, it is brilliant. The truth is that it's rare to find literary prose, or for that matter political criticism, as refined as this.' Dagens Nyheter 'Tichy describes disturbing incidents with bracing candour. 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 'What Tichy'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 behaviour? Welcome to Andrzej Tichy's Purity, then.' Tobias Carroll, Words without Borders