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A Swedish cellist’s encounter with a homeless junkie stirs memories of his own troubled youth in this radical short novel
If modernism exposed the ordinary realist novel as a kind of cover-up job on the essential messiness of human consciousness, its aversion to literary norms – chapter breaks, speech marks, tidy syntax and the like – have been debated ever since: even the chair of the Booker jury that gave the prize to Anna Burns’s Milkman suggested readers might find it easier going as an audiobook.
One suspects that Andrzej Tichý has no truck with that kind of thinking. In Wretchedness, his first book to be translated from Swedish, someone tells an artist: “You’ve got talent, but you know, you should do something simpler, so the man on the street can appreciate it, you get me, something straighter, clearer.” Note the reply: “Stop chatting shit, bro, I am the fucking man on the street.”A blurry tornado of voices and timelines, this short novel unspools over eight paragraphs of run-on sentences swirling around the memories of a cellist raised on an estate outside Malmö. He’s heading for the train station to catch a concert in Copenhagen with two fellow musicians, discussing the ins and outs of microtonal composition, when he encounters a homeless addict begging for money – a run-in that prompts a dizzying array of criss-crossing memories of his own impoverished youth, marked by violence, crime and drug use. Continue reading...