Purity

Finalist for the 2021 Nordic Council Literature Prize

Purity’s stories take the reader through cities and suburbs, apartments and streets, to find characters struggling to survive in modern society: a man has a breakdown on a bus; a fugitive gains insight from a colour wheel; a social realist kills his friend with a hammer; a thief proclaims his innocence. And cleaners reluctantly clean up.

With weight as well as humour, people are depicted as fallen, in the process of falling or waiting to fall, against the backdrop of a violent civilization, rendered by Tichý with the fury of Thomas Bernhard.