Description

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. With gravity and humour, against the backdrop of a violent civilization, people are depicted as fallen, or waiting to fall, rendered by Tichy with the fury, compassion and emotional complexity of Kendrick Lamar.

Publisher Review

‘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