Renheten

Renheten Purity

In Purity, Andrzej Tichý combines a short-form, multi-faceted narrative of the chaotic outbursts within the relative order of society. The people in these stories all struggle to relate to the structures that layer the world and the human psyche: a man has an outburst of on a bus; a fugitive finds a colour wheel and gains insight from it; a social realist kills his friend with a hammer; a thief proclaims his innocence. And, the cleaners reluctantly clean up.

With weight as well as humour, people are depicted as fallen—those who are in the process of doing so, and those who are still waiting to fall—all against the foundation of a violent civilization that tries to seize the meaning of one’s own death sentence, rendered by Tichý with a fury of words in the style of Thomas Bernhard.

Awards

Nordic Council Prize nominee 2021
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Reviews

  • Purity is a strong and literary challenging book, emotionally charged, intricate and ceaselessly fascinating, poetic and tender, even in its dark way humoristic, through all its roughness, deep grief, blood and shit. ”

    Aftonbladet, Sweden

  • “/…/ 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, Sweden

  • “A feverish kind of despair about the eternal machine of abuse of power thrusts Tichý’s disparate voices into an affecting whole.”

    Svenska Dagbladet, Sweden

  • “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, Sweden

  • “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, Sweden

  • “A characteristically brutal, though often beautiful, book (…) in this desensitised world, Tichý seems to ask, can anything truly shock anybody any more?”

    Financial Times, UK

  • Purity is at its most coldly satisfying when Andrzej Tichý’s prose is at its most unexpurgated. (…) Here, what these characters are saying is made more impactful by how they say it. /…/ 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. ”

    Buzz Magazine, UK

Author
Photo: Carla Orrego Veliz Andrzej Tichý
Published
2020
Genre
  • Literary
Pages
246
Reading material

Swedish edition

English edition

Rights sold

Sweden, Albert Bonniers

UK, And Other Stories (World English)

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