The cover of Andrzej Tichý’s Purity (And Other Stories, 2024), superbly translated from Swedish by Nichola Smalley, doesn’t say whether the book is a story collection, a novel, a cycle, or hybrid, and it’s tough to tell until the third story—definitely a story, now, not a chapter. But in “The Runaway,” a seemingly elderly woman, speaking from beyond her own death, struggles to wrest narratorial primacy from an unnamed third-person voice. She begins her final paragraph, “You’ll be my way out. . . . And it makes no difference what you’re thinking or feeling, or whether or not you believe in transcendence or whatever you call it. I’m already inside of you.” Purity’s characters, its desperate narrators and helpless narrative objects, are not looking for readers, but hosts. For them, the only way out is through.
A page later, in a story titled “Strength and Unity,” we have a new narrator with no indication of any link to the old woman. The new narrator makes clear that he will leave all talk of the politics in his tale to “the devoted hacks and essayists your reality is crawling with.” I appreciate the shout-out. Later, we learn that this middle-aged man is also writing to us in first-person after his own death. In his words, “Sometimes, when men spend time together, it can be hard to tell what’s for real and what’s a game.”
Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, after using his first manuscript’s pages for cigarette papers during World War II, made good on the waste by giving us Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, in which he defines the literary “carnivalesque” as a polyphony of voices that prevents an author’s or primary narrator’s opinion from dominating the movement of a novel.
Tichý’s carnival goes a little further than that orchestrated by Dostoyevsky’s elusive narrator in Demons. The author eases us into it. The first few stories swap narrators and puncture the notion of realism both implicitly (the narrations after death, for example) and explicitly (the narrator’s pointed scowl at “your reality”). But the title-track, “Purity,” distills Bakhtin’s carnivalesque potatoes into stern vodka and draws its politics into the prose, rather than leaving such things to the “hacks and essayists.”
“Purity” makes such an argument for itself as the collection’s center that it reminds me of “Body by Drake” in James Nulick’s Haunted Girlfriend (Expat Press, 2019), which instantly makes the whole collection feel like a well-wrought wrapper for this one long story. Separated into short segments, each with a new narrator whose name (or lack thereof) gives the segment its italicized subtitle, “Purity” embeds its own literary theory in the name that heads its first section: “Kunegunda,” loosely translatable as “war between families.” The segment begins, “And then there was one who wanted to tell her children about how it felt to clean discotheques in the eighties. About the exhaustion, the lack of sleep. The particular smell of the toilets.”
Andrzej Tichý’s parents brought him to Malmö, Sweden when he was three years old—just old enough to remember, and to describe his life in Sweden as that of an immigrant rather than as a child of immigrants. His previous novel about immigrant life, Wretchedness (2020) was longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize. The year Wretchedness came out in English, Renheten (in English, Purity) was a finalist for the Nordic Council Literature Prize. In a 2020 interview, Tichý told The Guardian that “From the outside, Sweden was this paradise. But it was never actually true.”
Tichý fleshes out that sense of paradise a priori lost in Kunegunda’s painful recollection of cleaning eighties dance clubs. As “Purity” the story goes on, the core of Purity the collection clarifies: Segments are narrated by cleaners, by manual laborers whose families live on the street, by young men so fed up with their treatment by ostensibly paradisaical Sweden that they become vengeful criminals, cracking windows and throwing improvised bombs, and by higher-class Swedes having a fine time, occupied with entirely different concerns. Many subsections in, Tichý begins to play with his conceit: A narrator named “Yet another name” writes only, “And then maybe someone will help you.” Another named “Insignificant name” works as a hotel cleaner and tells us about clearing rooms of body fluids. Under the heading, “The Same Name,” an otherwise nameless narrator recalls what a nameless woman wanted to tell her brother: “I wish there was a scene I could call upon to illustrate my experience of class.” She can’t know it—she’s trapped in the story—but the layered namelessness has done it for her. Another narrator, Vitali, explains Tichý’s games of namelessness a few pages later: “You can count the holes, right?…And if you can count them, there has to be something, there must be something for you to count.” If the connection between Vitali’s philosophizing and the rest of the story is not yet clear, a few pages later, a narrator called “Muslim name” writes us the key, a three-word segment that joins the whole book together: “And everything rhymes.”
There are too many name-games in “Purity” to spell them all out—but each, as an explicit game (not a gimmick) recalls and solves anew the puzzle proffered by the narrator of “Strength and Unity,” that when men (writ large) get together, it’s tough to tell games from reality. The games in “Purity” are precisely reality and are gamified by the narrators’ realities.
Since Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, the distance between a story collection and a cycle, and, in turn, between each and a novella or novel, has been more indeterminate, a blurred lattice rather than clean-capped spans. In the last few years, a group of writers has developed those blurs as a narrative form of its own (mixed singular and plural intentional) by blurring the divisions between their books’ narrators. Yoko Ogawa’s 1998 Japanese horror collection Revenge (translated to English in 2013 by Stephen Snyder for Picador) progresses similarly to Purity, each story a new narrator, with strange connections between the narrators, realized by none of them but flagrant to the reader, so that the collection—especially its tightly connected second half—comes just shy of becoming a cycle or novel. Gina Apostol’s 2023 novel La Tercera (SoHo Press) performs a comparable carnival of narration by allowing its protagonista to narrate at different ages with little hint as to when the voice has time-traveled.
In Ogawa, Apostol, and Tichý, there is a geographic kinship similar to that of the American Westerns and Spaghetti Westerns of the mid-twentieth century, which ties these books together in the shifting waves of what I’ll call “coastality”: a novel appears on the beach and is chopped by a breaking wave, and now, as a story collection, it hints at its overarching cohesion in more subtle ways. Coastality is the global harbor style, a book-long story that can’t maintain just one plot line because its tide shifts, and some new family pitches out a blanket just a few feet down the beach from where another group sat not but a moment back. There is some forerunner of this in the shifting voices between the chapters of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and the old Cuban novelists’ mythic trips with their mentees to Cuba’s northern shore, where, so the story goes, they would point to Mississippi, to Faulkner and his grave, and say, “Your father’s there.”
And, as in each of those others, Tichý finds his explicit politics eventually, defining the positive holes about which he’d philosophized earlier. Later in the title story, a narrator christened “Your name and mine” lectures, “And sometimes we get to have the same name. But listen, my parents clean your parents’ offices and your parents’ big houses. You and I—we’re not the same.” He gets his point across. But his book is not just a political screed about the many plights of immigrants to Sweden, even though it’s also that.
What Tichý’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.” Tichý allows no identity to persist, certainly no realistic narrator, thus no implied author, and therefore his political criticisms hold their weight, without collapsing the carnivalesque nature of their various narrators’ independence, as they would if he repeated the staid truisms of postcolonial canon. There’s no recipe for grandma’s soup here, which she sadly, oh so sadly, can’t boil in her new country, no semi-naked autobiography. But there is a brilliant series of narrators and their stories, each of which could become their own novels. Tichý is a partisan of compression as much as of complex narratology. And in each new narrator there is a radiant hope against hopelessness, some expansive idea of his immigrant experience, which propels the whole thing along as though it were, in fact, a novel, each story’s and each voice’s wants and needs and wishes compounding into the next. But where a novel permits an ending, Tichý’s book, like the best story collections, does no such thing. Recalling the cyclic, just-shy-of-autobiography form of Clemens Meyer’s While We Were Dreaming, Purity ends with the line “when we were kids,” no period, so that the collection’s terminal “One Last Anecdote” effaces its own apparent role and calls for more of the type of recollection that has built the collection, and then a second read.
