Purity — poetry and profanities characterise these brutal tales

“It all starts with the voice,” a narrator tells us at the outset of Andrzej Tichý’s Purity. This is, perhaps, a surprising assertion. After all, the acclaimed Czech-born, Malmö-based writer and critic has gone on record as saying that in recent years he has increasingly “gravitated towards forms that don’t have a clear, ‘pure’ voice”. So what does the voice that sets this collection in motion say? It says: “I’ll kick your teeth in.”

It’s a brutal introduction to a characteristically brutal, though often beautiful, book. Comprising 11 short stories, Purity is the author’s first such collection to appear in English, thanks to his translator Nichola Smalley, and a follow-up to his success with the International Booker-longlisted novel Wretchedness (also translated by Smalley, and for which she received the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize).

Yet where Wretchedness presented a Trainspotting-esque tale of delinquent youth marked by violence, crime and substance abuse, Purity explodes these themes, rearranging them in kaleidoscopic configurations and distributing them among the marginalised, broken and demented.

In the titular story, which takes up more than 60 pages of this slim volume, Tichý offers up fictionalised accounts of society’s “cleaners” — both literal and metaphorical — who so often remain nameless and invisible. Who, he invites us to consider, mops up “the cigarette butts and vomit on the floor”? Who sweeps away “the traces of amphetamine and cocaine”? Who wipes off the excrement that somebody has wantonly smeared on the walls of a hotel bathroom? Who can buy himself out of having to dirty his hands? With each account related by “a name”, “another name”, an “insignificant name”, a “redacted name”, a “Muslim name”, the titular theme is reinterpreted in ever thornier, more unsettling ways — sexual disease, religious devotion, economic hygiene, ethnic cleansing.

A chronicler par excellence of modern misery and immiseration, Tichý resists any attempt at glamourisation of his themes. Yet for such potentially weighty material, he still manages to preserve a lightness of touch. His interest lies, consistently, more in literature than in sociology. And while many of the collection’s societal preoccupations — poverty, class, power — tread well-worn ground, what sets Tichý’s prose apart from the dowdier, more conventionally socially conscious fare is his command of form, his ability to use chains of abstract association in combination with shifting, anonymised first-person narratives to pull the rug out from under his readers.

The stories in Purity have a tendency to metamorphose in unanticipated ways. What begins in “The Usual Thoughts” as a drive down memory lane shifts gear and careens towards an alarming climax. In “Strength and Unity”, we meet a murderer whose crime is told — paradoxically — from the victim’s perspective. And in “Outburst”, an unnerving encounter with a maniac on a bus provokes recollections of a past love, only for time to loop imperceptibly back on itself and lead us, Escher-like, back to the moments immediately before the encounter that kicked it all off.

“My books are often about structures,” Tichý has said. And, to be sure, his manipulation of structure is impressive. Even on a macro level, the stories in this collection resonate with recurring leitmotifs that pop up in the most unexpected of places — images of rotting fruit, blood, excrement, familial strain, a blurring between life and death, good and evil. Each note combines to provide pleasing moments of harmony in these often violent, arresting works.

Yet for all that Purity’s structure may be subtly balanced, the language, here rendered boldly once again by Smalley, is more jagged. Tichý has chosen for himself a hallmark of abrupt shifts in tone, in which poetry suddenly gives way to profanity, mellifluousness to menace. “The psychosis is coming, fuckgirl,” one voice threatens, jolting the protagonist of “The Runaway” out of her contemplation of a spinning colour wheel. In other times, this may have been seen as an attempt to épater les bourgeois. But in this desensitised world, Tichý seems to ask, can anything truly shock anybody any more?

“Most people . . . believe they’re opposed to violence,” one voice chillingly observes. “But they’re not. Not really.” Time and again, Purity gives us proof of this. For all their surrealism, these detached, disembodied narratives have a curious way of leading us back to this unalloyed truth. “Nothing [is] as instructive as enmity,” another voice intones. Tichý’s are unnerving postulates. And, alas, ones that our increasingly violent present appears to be bearing out.

Purity by Andrzej Tichý, translated by Nichola Smalley, And Other Stories £14.99, 208 pages

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