Purity

The lives of working-class immigrants in present-day Sweden provide fodder for Tichý’s alternately impressive and frustrating story collection (after the novel Wretchedness). The narrator of the affecting “One Last Anecdote,” a drug addict estranged from his children, misses spending time with his brother. “It was a special feeling, a really sick feeling,” he thinks, “being able to talk, not being afraid.” Some entries display a mordant sense of humor, as when the narrator of “On the Waves” hears a poet discussing his penis on the radio and laments: “I’d been hoping for the news.” The title story is a kaleidoscopic series of first-person accounts from people who work as cleaners: one is called in to deal with “unusually messy suicides,” while another straightens up his client’s house after trashing it with his friends, having taken inspiration from A Clockwork Orange. In “Outburst,” a high-water mark of the collection, the narrator encounters an angry stranger who reminds him of his ex-girlfriend, leading him to reflect on the nature of miscommunication. The prose can be repetitive (“You don’t know what fear is. But one day you’ll know. You think you know but you don’t know”), but Tichý describes disturbing incidents with bracing candor. Taken together, these stories form an unforgettable tableau of life on the edge. (June)