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. ”

• “/…/ 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. ”

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

• “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.”

• “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. ”

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

• “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. ”