Malmö, Sweden. A cellist meets a spun-out junkie. That could have
been me. His mind starts to glitch between his memories and the
avant-garde music he loves, and he descends into his past, hearing
all over again the chaotic song of his youth. He emerges to a
different sound, heading for a crash.
From sprawling
housing projects to underground clubs and squat parties, Wretchedness
is a blistering trip through the underbelly of Europe’s cities.
Powered by a furious, unpredictable beat, this is a paean to
brotherhood, to those who didn’t make it however hard they fought,
and a visceral indictment of the poverty which took them.
"Graphic depictions of crime, racism, poverty, drug use and
violence are rendered through paragraph-free slabs of text that
propulsively veer between voices and minds, times and locations. As
well as the Swedish estates, the novel draws on Tichý’s
experiences of living in Hamburg and London to paint a picture of a
pan-European community of the excluded passing through squats,
underground clubs, petty scams and cash-only employment. [...]
Tichý’s early creative life centered on music and there is a sense
of musicality inherent Wretchedness." ―Nicholas Wroe, Guardian
A musician takes stock of his sordid life in this seedy,
stream-of-consciousness confessional set in the streets, basements,
and other hives of Sweden.
Tichý’s
sort-of-novel was shortlisted for Sweden’s most prestigious
literary prize, but whether this ranting, breathless confessional
makes more sense in the original language is anyone’s guess. Even
if it had more form and a less nonsensical style, at best it would
keep company with the likes of Kerouac and the form-shattering Beats
or maybe with the junkie lit that takes a meandering path from
Burroughs to Irvine Welsh and on to Tony O’Neill’s desperate
memoirs or, more recently, Nico Walkers’ Cherry. Yes, there are
chapter breaks, but the novel itself is not so much crafted as
unloaded in one rarely broken, sporadically punctuated block of
first-person soliloquy by the protagonist, a freelance musician named
Cody. As they say, music is his life, and he spends much of the novel
pontificating on genres and specific bands ranging from John Cage to
Nirvana in High Fidelity–like fashion, although his specific
obsession seems to be with the surrealistic Italian composer Giacinto
Scelsi. The book is also something of a contemplation on mortality,
as punctuated by the musician’s brief introductory interlude with a
half-beaten addict on a bridge that comes back around as a
surrealistic echo late in the game. The setting is raw, largely
taking place in ugly hidey-holes that could just as easily be found
in the council blocks of London or Edinburgh or Chicago’s public
housing projects as in the gritty housing estates dotting the city of
Malmö, Sweden. A mostly forgettable supporting cast doesn't distract
much from Cody’s self-lacerating monologues, which can run pages at
a time with only the occasional comma to break his caustic train of
thought: “...I don’t know, Cody, I don’t know why I’m going
over this again, over and over again, this mess, over and over again,
this miserable shit, this murderously boring dirge...” and so on
and on and on.
An inventive,
linguistically adept experiment that appears to have been made
painful to read on purpose. - Kirkus Reviews
‘Wretchedness is a
social novel whose descent into hardship is haunting, and whose lead
character is an example of the hazy line between surviving a
lifestyle or falling prey to it.’ - Foreword Reviews
‘Visceral . . . a
fascinating read, the real-life details of which further bolster the
fiction . . . This is nightmarish, impressionistic literature whose
disjointed sentences have an associative flow that accumulates to a
shocking whole.’ - Sarah Gilmartin, Irish Times
‘The polyphony of
voices is tightly interwoven . . . arranged into a narrative
resembling a complex musical composition . . . The book ends
abruptly, as an avant-garde piece of music might, but the vibrations
continue to fill the air.’ - Anna Aslanyan, The Guardian
‘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 . . . the novel builds to
an unexpectedly heart-stopping . . . finale, with a frame-breaking
time-slip that invites us to reconsider everything we’ve just read
as a stylistically radical expression of survivor’s guilt.’ - Anthony Cummins, Book of the Day, The Observer
"An utterly
phenomenal read: a masterclass in hyper-modernist experimentation,
voice and form. Embracing the bitter realities of addiction,
prejudice and inner-city turmoil, Tichý’s rapid prose roves
internal dialogues, places, vernaculars and circumstances to expose a
singular, absorbed world struggling to keep itself afloat. Through a
complex network of characters, friends and strangers we’re made to
think about the ways the human spirit can fall into despair, its
ability to establish resolve, to love and remember, and the myriad
philosophies it leaves us with."―Anthony Anaxagorou
“What can a
survivor do with their history? Can you be loyal to the friends you
left behind? Andrzej Tichý turns this wretched reality into
something poignant. His polyphonic novel has a rough, rhythmic melody
and a ferocious rage.”―August Prize Judges
“Tichý writes a
delirious, detailed prose, studded with Malmö slang and contemporary
verve. The language pours forth over the pages like a contaminated
river, full of filth, despair and anxiety, an associative flow of
long, disjointed, almost endless sentences.” ―Eva Johansson,
Svenska Dagbladet
"Wretchedness
is a wild intoxicant of language, momentum, and voice. Andrzej Tichý
is a master of despair." ―Patty Yumi Cottrell
"Some kind of
holy/unholy meeting of Thomas Bernhard and The Geto Boys,
Wretchedness is an anguished, brutal, beautiful piece of
phantasmagoric-realism, an act of remembrance through imagination,
animated by rhythm, and pouring past you with the inevitability of
the tide coming in. Brilliantly written, superbly translated, this
small book packs in more sadness and moments of epiphany, more
hopelessness and hope, more surviving - more life! - than most
writers manage in a whole career. Remarkable." ―Will Ashon
"The past is so
close behind in Nichola Smalley’s translation of Tichý’s precise
maelstrom of memory, music and survival – on the margins of this
and every city – that you can smell the chemicals on its breath.
There’s nothing to lose and too much to lose; no escape and all our
escapes. Keep going. Read it and be thankful for Andrzej Tichý."
―Tony White
"A bravura,
urgent head-trip of a novel, replete with compassion, rage, and
gimlet-eyed observation on every page. Essential reading - us
English-speakers are lucky to have Tichy’s work available in
translation at last." ―Luke Kennard
"A powerful,
voice-driven novel that remains in the mind long after the final
page. Tichý brings everything to life: circumstances and people we’d
rather ignore, with a flow resembling music." ―Derek Owusu
"Wretchedness
is a red-blooded ode to the most invisible and unwanted in society -
immigrant workers, the homeless, addicts, and those born into the
hardest of circumstances. Tichý’s gasping, polyphonic prose flies
through time and space and drug-induced states, flinging us between
disturbing recollections, hopeless presents, and deferred or tainted
futures - all connected by bittersour camaraderies and the remedying
power of music." ―Jen Calleja
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.
“Every time I
think a thought, a thousand other thoughts flood in and I can’t
distinguish between them,” the narrator says. It isn’t always
easy for us either – not least when, without much by way of
warning, he starts speaking to himself in the voice of a friend who
died in circumstances that continue to sting.
There’s a
sink-or-swim quality to all this, offset by the sheer vigour of the
brawls, binges and comedowns that bubble up from the narrator’s
past, as he recounts his life prior to entering adult education. We
read about playing five-a-side football with a childhood friend
jailed for assaulting someone with a screwdriver; about the “taste
of sweaty, reused face masks” while putting in 10-hour shifts on a
building site; about friends listening to rap and playing Resident
Evil while mooting conspiracy theories about sportswear companies and
the Illuminati.
Tichý would have
been 18 in the mid-90s, and for British readers, parts of
Wretchedness may recall the Trainspotting-fuelled boom in druggy
vernacular fiction of that era, with a sense of nostalgia heightened
by passing references to, say, drum’n’bass label Metalheadz, or
Mary Anne Hobbs’s Radio 1 show Breezeblock. Sharper passages about
the experience of social deprivation might land most pointedly in
Sweden: as the narrator remembers growing up in a multi-ethnic suburb
maligned as “a human rubbish dump”, in the words of one bitterly
recalled headline, it’s clearly part of the book’s project to
disrupt perceptions of the country as a liberal utopia.
“In the end, we
don’t know what’s true, what’s false, where one thing starts
and the next finishes, or what one thing has to do with the next,”
someone says. While that isn’t a bad way to sum up much of the
experience of Wretchedness, the novel builds to an unexpectedly
heart-stopping (and head-scratching) finale, with a frame-breaking
time-slip that invites us to reconsider everything we’ve just read
as a stylistically radical expression of survivor’s guilt. -
Anthony Cummins
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/08/wretchedness-by-andrzej-tichy-review-a-tornado-of-voices-and-timelines
Early in Swedish
author Andrzej Tichý’s fifth novel, Wretchedness, this reader had
the sinking feeling that the narrative would be a latter-day,
sentimental retrospective on drug addiction and random violence, its
events set in urban squalor populated by, to borrow from Kerouac,
“desolation angels.” That was soon proven wrong, as Tichý
achieves something more like a sophisticated version of
Trainspotting. Unlike Irving Welsh’s gallows humor, however,
Tichý’s discordant sounds and philosophies seem to be in unison
with the wasted terrain of Wretchedness. The novel offers an ugly
picture of racial strife hidden in Sweden (and elsewhere), as well as
the resulting economic disadvantages endured by those living in the
margins. Here we have the next lost generation of immigrant youth
depicted not in a cynical manner, but in a rather melancholy swansong
and bleak realism:
Place is everything
and death is placelessness to us. Bodylessness. We’re the confined
ones, we’re the ones incapable of using our gifts. Despair, sorrow,
loneliness. Insomnia creates new spaces, pockets of time, has a
unique light, unique sounds, how they appear depends on where you
live, the way everything depends on where you live.
Or, to have the book
put its central argument of dispossession more tersely, “This is no
home . . . this is just housing.” Following suit, the story of
Wretchedness never settles down anywhere for too long, a feature of
the narrative design that enacts the “placelessness.” In the
novel’s present-day, recollective point-of-view, a cellist is
approached while waiting to catch a recital of work by Italian
composer Giacinto Scelsi. The homeless addict who approaches strikes
up a conversation with him, and the musician begins to feel the tug
of his yesteryears. He remembers life as a squatter, his rovings
across Sweden and the rest of Europe with an ever-morphing list of
acquaintances, the hang-outs and raves in burned-out neighborhoods.
All of this Tichý establishes with a Proustian device set by the
cellist to sound itself:
. . . I looked down
at the gravel, down at the grains of gravel, and it made the noise
that it does and I felt something, a diffuse pain, and I thought, as
though in the background, while I was speaking, whether I should
mention something to them. But what? I didn’t want to make a big
deal out of it. The feeling, this pain that was impossible to locate
or describe, was familiar, but ungraspable.
Instead of opening
up about this past to his now-present colleagues, the cellist quietly
contemplates thoughts and memories of former traumas, large and
small. Through casual conversation on Classical composition, Tichý
negotiates a balance between the cellist’s personal meditation and
the intellectual meanderings of his coworkers:
. . . but I was
thinking too of that time I got a cracked rib after getting kicked in
the chest, and that pain, I recall it so clearly, those breaths, so
shallow, so careful so as not to cause more pain, that absolutely
horrific pain, and the contradiction of feeling it when you breathe,
which you can’t stop doing, you have to breathe after all, you have
to live after all, and I didn’t hear what the guitarist said and I
thought I had to sort myself out, pull myself together, so I focused
my gaze and said: Airs? As in the stuff we breathe? You have to live
after all, I thought again. Yeah, as in air, the composer said. Like
shoes, don’t you have some of those? Yeah, look, she pointed at my
shoes, at my feet, down at the gravel. Like Nike Airs, she said.
Plural, air in plural. And the guitarist said: yeah, that’s right.
Or in a way at least. Air or ayre, it means like, song or melody, and
it’s actually connected to aria, which from like air or aer, but
then . . . he lost his thread a moment . . . I mean, it’s patterns,
he said, it’s that, he almost stammered, it’s that, that, that,
that the music is there in the oscillations, there, there’s,
there’s, there’s nothing strange about it.
This passage is a
glimpse of how the work proceeds, navigating between physical pain,
memory, language, and music theory. While advance praise for
Wretchedness noted the ambitious form, the stylistic wordplay and
rapid stream of consciousness should be recognizable to modern and
postmodern fiction readers, as should the break-neck jump cuts
between past and present. The novel strings together a series of
flashbacks comprised of run-on conversations, slang, and epithets, as
well as the occasional imaginary dialogue—the latter acknowledged
as such by the cellist at times. In this regard, Tichý consistently
blurs lines, up until the very end where he attempts what appears to
be a striking perspective shift in the novel’s conclusion (other
readers may interpret differently). That said, the overall pattern is
straightforward enough to pick up after the first chapter, but it may
not take much to get lost in the ensuing miasma as the cellist dives
further into his rising guilt.
Punctuating this
dread of survival is the novel’s ubiquitous budding of white, wax
flowers. They act as a sign of continual mystery to the cellist, a
way for him to derive harmonic order from the dregs of his past
existence. By the end, though, the rags-to-riches trope hasn’t
surfaced. This missing link in the story underscores the strange
dichotomy between the narrator’s two different lives which
apparently have no direct relation to each other—except for the
love of music and a love of friends. For all their cultured trappings
as Classical musicians, the orchestral colleagues appear not to share
any of his experiences, or at least not his current distractions.
They are, then, the limit against which the cellist seems to measure
and set himself.
While it is tempting
to fully embrace Giacinto Scelsi’s improvisational style of
composition (given the cellist’s careful study of him), Classical
music is not alone in the structure of Wretchedness. Tichý has
carefully built in an eclectic soundtrack of pop music, often briefly
referencing what to American readers will likely be obscure European
acts, in addition to better known non-commercial albums of the 1980s
and ’90s—the Trip-Hop hornwork of DJ Krush and Toshinori Kondo’s
Ki-Oku are there, as are Harold Budd and Brian Eno’s The Pearl,
along with Metallica, Slipknot, and Snoop Dogg. In all, it makes an
engaging catalogue of music for its time, which in turn feeds our
perception of the cellist’s musical training. Giacinto Scelsi,
however, is clearly the primary inspiration, the grounds from which
the cellist conducts everything in his narration. The novel is, then,
a moving interpretation of microtonal sounds juxtaposed with sordid
incidents.
Wretchedness is a
forceful, challenging take on the dashed hopes of the immigrant song.
While it is Tichý’s first novel to be translated into English, it
likely will not be the last. - Forrest Roth
https://www.theliteraryreview.org/book-review/review-wretchedness-by-andrzej-tichy/
The cellist narrator
tries to remember ‘the name of an Italian philosopher who’d
written a long and exceptionally deep and incisive essay on {composer
Giacinto} Scelsi’s importance’. What the cellist recalls instead
of the essay is a fight on a housing estate, during which he (the
narrator) choked another boy in a headlock, while a third kid burned
the headlocked kid’s back with a lighted aerosol. In the opening
pages of Wretchedness, Andrzej Tichý handles the transition between
these two tones – discussion of avant-garde art and description of
physical combat – so meticulously that it is almost invisible.
Thrilled by the combination of Scelsi and a lighted aerosol, I am
primed to read a novel – Tichý’s third, and his first to be
translated from Swedish into English – which joins the dots between
them. This is going to be a story about how a poor boy on an estate
became a renowned cellist.
But this is not,
thankfully, that story. This novel cannot join the dots because it
is, ostentatiously, a novel without any middle. It’s intense: it
soars with no middle flight, as Milton put it. It’s also full of
jump cuts: one minute the narrator’s in a cruise ship kitchen,
deafened by Slipknot’s ‘People = Shit’, arguing about the size
of an alcoholic chef’s balls; the next minute he’s taking a
stroll along a Stockholm canal with a guitarist and a composer,
discussing open C tuning and the pentatonic scale. One minute, he’s
remembering a Bosnian rave filling with human shit, or describing
himself as ‘finger-fucking myself in the throat {…} as though I
had a cunt in my face’; the next minute, he’s involved in an
earnest discussion of the compositions of Terry Riley. The world is
full of potential states of mind and action, I heard the book saying,
and here are some of them recorded, for perhaps the first time, with
beautiful transparency and power.
Then came the end.
As a book without a middle, of course it ends where it begins.
Almost. With a clever and forceful sleight of hand, the final page
appears to change the narrative perspective, handing it from one
character to another. This happens just as effortlessly as the
writing switches codes, but its implications are significant. With
this manoeuvre, the book splits off from itself – there is a crack
running through that finely smoothed plane where Scelsi and Slipknot
meet. All of a sudden, it seems as though there are two worlds after
all, with an impasse between them. I had to go back to the book’s
beginning and read the whole thing once more. In one dream passage,
fighting at a bus stop bleeds seamlessly into listening to a John
Cage composition. On first reading, that makes intuitive sense. The
experiences are similar in some ways: repetitious, mixing pleasure
with pain. But on a second read, this passage runs as a film, in
which violence is made pretty by a soundtrack of minimalist piano
that the bleeding ears of the characters cannot hear.
Giacinto Scelsi was
a reclusive Italian aristocrat, whose deeply weird compositions, most
of which were actually written down from Scelsi’s improvisations by
‘an underling, a so-called “negro” ’, include the 1959
‘Quattro Pezzi su una nota sola’, a piece for twenty-six
musicians, in which they all play the same one note. Not knowing
anything about Scelsi, I went on Spotify, found a couple of podcasts
online and emailed a friend. My friend told me that Scelsi was
groundbreaking in how dramatically he shifted the expressive focus
away from harmony and structure over to timbre and density. This was
what I’d wanted to hear: a fine analogy with Andrzej Tichý’s
book, where harmony and structure are the rough equivalent of the
typical apparatus of the contemporary novel (scenes, dialogue,
character development), from which Tichý dramatically shifts the
focus, towards the rough textual equivalents of timbre and density,
which are timbre and density. In dense, chapter-length paragraphs,
it’s often difficult to tell who is speaking, whose memory is being
recalled, where they are and why. What matters more is how it all
sounds, the clashes and stresses in the language and the energy of
the surface, how it strives, ascends, descends, and trembles, like a
tug-of war between weight and levity (to paraphrase a description
from the book of Scelsi’s Fourth String Quartet). Here’s an
extended quotation:
Amine looked away
and went down to his station, always the same thing, you know, Mush
couldn’t really tell the names Andrea and Anders apart, he used to
call Andrea Anders and vice versa, or he’d just call them both
Andrews, so in the end they both wrote their names in Arabic on the
fronts of those white disposable chef’s hats we had, so Mush could
just shout his Yalla, yalla! Work, work! Andesh! Andrah! Move
yourself! in between the Arabic harangues that had Tahar and Amine
clenching their jaws in humiliation, dropping their gazes and going
back to mopping the floors, loading up the dishes, scrubbing grease
off the stove, or whatever they were doing. Same old, same old, said
Rawna, it’s the same old shit. It’s still raining. What’s
happening, Kiko? I say. Are we at the Elephant already? Who’s
driving anyway? Cool it, bro, Rawna says, pulling her sleeve down
over her messed-up forearm at last, and I look at her and say nothing
at first, but I’m thinking about the mouse on the floor of my room
that time she came to see me. Then I can’t help myself, and I say
Rawna, do you remember? Do you remember that time you stayed with me,
when you were trying to come off horse and all that?
Tichý’s style has
drawn comparisons with Thomas Bernhard. They share long sentences of
nested scenes, unbearably insistent on nothing in particular.
Bernhard was also deeply interested in music, and critics have used
musical form as a way of making sense of the Austrian novelist’s
outrageous relationship with conventional plot. There are telling
differences between Bernhard and Tichý: where Bernhard affirms in
the negative – the more he disdains, the brighter the text burns –
Tichý is more likely to affirm by affirming. The narrator wants to
be in the car, wants Rawna to remember. Bernhard’s charisma is
often felt in an exaggerated intolerance of others, at odds with the
seeming abundance and generosity of the text itself. Tichý flirts
with this – at one point the narrator suggests the extermination of
the addict father of a friend’s children – but in Wretchedness
the voice of judgment is so layered with other voices and tones that
the overall effect is of refusing a vantage from which to pronounce.
If the novel has what Jay-Z calls braggadocio, it’s in this
virtuosic layering, rather than in the author’s (humble)brags –
although the accompanying playlist is as carefully eclectic as
anything on NTS or Pitchfork. The wretchedness of Tichý’s title is
not, primarily, the wretchedness of one life as opposed to another,
and nor does it describe the wretched real as opposed to conceptual
purity. Tichý uses Simone Weil’s utterly mysterious and persuasive
quasi-definition as an epigraph: ‘Contradiction alone is the proof
that we are not everything. Contradiction is our wretchedness {…}
It is true. That is why we have to value it.’
Bernhard’s world
is the world of the sanatorium, the rustic retreat and the classical
conservatoire. Wretchedness takes place in tower blocks, astroturf
pitches and stolen cars. Most of the characters have lived in
different cities, from North Africa to Scandinavia. The vocabulary
operates on a microtonal scale, drawing on the ordinary lush
counterpoint of languages that literary diction so often thins out,
and which, as far as I can tell, Nichola Smalley transfers to, or
reinvents in, English. Like the cruise ship kitchen, the book is
always moving. It does not have a fixed centre, because there is no
fixed centre:
you start
thinking finally a little peace and quiet, finally a little respite,
as they say, finally respectus, refugium, sanctum, the kind of stuff
the coconuts come out with, and you know my dad told me this is
paradise, and thirty years later he’d acknowledge that the whole
thing had been a bluff, a lie, that he regretted the whole move, the
whole emigration, as he put it, the emigration, cos, you know, he was
ever an immigrant in his own mind, no fucking immigrant, he was an
emigrant, man, an exile, brah.
That ‘brah’ –
is it meant to ring as authentic or forced? In translation it’s
difficult to tell which idioms are, in effect, already translated in
the original text, and which just sound translated in translation.
Sometimes, reading the book has the feel of the corner of a squat
rave occupied by someone frightening and friendly, who wants you to
see the face of God in the broken window; sometimes, it feels like
dinner with a classical composition postgraduate, enthusing about
their PhD on Mobb Deep and Kafka. Wretchedness is interested in this
kind of contradiction. Do these voices come from the same person’s
mouth? If not, why not?
The narrator
remembers a former housemate foaming at the mouth in front of the TV.
He’d started selling ketamine to stay solvent and could not resist
snorting it himself. The friend is called Erik, sharing his name with
that hero of the twentieth-century avant-garde, Erik Satie. I’m
scrambling for an analogy: Gymnopédies = k-hole? It kind of works.
Tichý seeds such speculations, while also making them feel absurd –
we are not everything! Satie’s choice to reference a Spartan
festival of naked wrestling as the title of his groundbreakingly
disembodied piano compositions is, to borrow a phrase from
Wretchedness, ‘almost a joke’. Tichý’s choice of Scelsi as one
of the few fixed points in the torrent of the novel has a similar
irony: Scelsi was notoriously detached from labour, even the labour
of his own compositions. He is a most quintessential highbrow, in
Virginia Woolf’s unintentionally ugly sense of an artist who, ‘for
some reason or another, {is} wholly incapable of dealing successfully
with what is called real life.’ ‘You spoilt bourgeois cunt,’
says Tichý’s narrator, using an intentionally ugly phrase, at a
house party. But who is being denounced? The passage goes on: ‘Who
said that? I’m ashamed. See myself as though from the outside: see
Becca kissing Cody and pushing half an E into his mouth.’
This comes towards
the end of Wretchedness, and what follows is a magnificent swansong
description of getting mashed. There is a small argument about
whether to leave the party because of a real-life baby in the corner.
The narrator is freaked out by ‘that filthy junkie whore of a
mother.’ Someone else replies: ‘What the fuck do you know bout
that chick.’ It’s a vaporous, inconsequential piece of dialogue –
an expression of the intense sensitivity that lets you know you’re
about to come up. Then the prose lifts off, in a naff-cool way,
spelling out the beat, ‘boom shaka tick click boom shaka tick,’ a
parody of the critic’s favourite rhythmic prose. As the long,
unusually continuous scene plays out, it becomes clear – at least
in retrospect – that the swell of euphoria will not end well. The
narrator loses track of the friends that have been the novel’s
distraction and its central, joyful concern. Without them, he is
vulnerable and uncertain, indistinguishable in fact from a hopeless,
homeless stranger, as seen through the eyes of a privileged cellist,
whose mind is elsewhere, attempting to remember something important.
- Caleb Klaces
https://www.thewhitereview.org/reviews/andrzej-tichys-wretchedness/
A cellist, waiting
by a canal for his friends, is approached by a junkie on the hunt for
cigarettes and change. Something sparks in the cellist’s memory,
and from this innocuous encounter spirals a novel of unremitting
intensity and bleakness. Almost nothing else happens as far as the
present-day plot is concerned: all the action is in the cellist’s
head. He has been thrown back into his past, submerged helplessly in
what we might be tempted to call a stream of consciousness, if that
didn’t suggest something too serene. Maelstrom might be closer to
the mark.
The past he cannot
escape – a world away from the urbane conversation of his new
friends – was one of poverty and violence in the housing estates of
Sweden’s marginalized immigrant underclass. His narrative
interweaves a dizzying multitude of voices, each with its own tale of
petty crime, or addiction, or mental breakdown. The boundaries
between speakers are constantly blurred in the jumble of his
thoughts, and what emerges is a collective experience of pain, loss
and desperation. Andrzej Tichý’s excoriating novel is, among other
things, a howl of defiance and rage in the name of those left behind
and ignored by liberal society; people for whom, as one character
puts it, “being screwed up was something to aspire to”.
It is a
claustrophobic reading experience. We are trapped in the cellist’s
mind, just as he is trapped in his past and the people he grew up
with are trapped in their world of limited horizons. Wretchedness
presents a realm of grimy squats and dimly lit hallways; and while
Tichý gives voice to the voiceless, he offers no easy solutions.
Indeed, his book often seems to mock those who affect to care about
the deprivation he so unsparingly depicts. “I know all about how
they come out and photograph us and talk about us in their seminars
and conferences”, one character bitterly complains. “Gutter
tourists”, another spits. There is incredulity, too, at the fact
that such people are apparently “comfortable, at home in their
bodies, their houses, their neighbourhoods … Shit, the world is
theirs”.
These resented
do-gooders are perhaps also the sorts of people who find themselves
reading challenging literary fiction, and so there is something
inherently confrontational about Tichý’s work. We are the gutter
tourists, and we are not let off the hook. But nor is this resentment
... - Peter Brown
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/andrzej-tichy-wretchedness-review-peter-brown/
Early in the novel,
Cody, a concert cellist and the protagonist of Wretchedness, recalls
visiting his friend in prison, where their conversation contains a
warning to—or an accusation against—reader, writer, and
translator alike:
you street-level
slum Samaritans, you gutter tourists, on the hunt for the next
aesthetic wonder, the next imagination-whetting, titillating larva,
the next grub who, anticipating metamorphosis, crawls around in the
dung covering itself in whatever grot emerges from its orifices, . .
. [people like you] hound the homeless, the beggars, pissheads,
junkies, the criminals, they’d skin a creature alive just cos their
still life is crying out for a splash of carmine red, they’ve got
no problem asking the suicide case to throw themselves in front of
the train fifty metres further along, so they get the fairground in
the background.
The texts on trial
range from the prisoner’s records to Tupac’s lyrics to the Bible,
Marx, and German philosophy, but the question for each is the same:
how can we ethically produce or consume art about human suffering?
And at the same time, how can we not?
Wretchedness—understood
both as a philosophical proposition and as the novel by Andrzej Tichý
that Nichola Smalley has translated from Swedish into stunning,
polyphonic English—offers a labyrinthine yet somehow also precise
answer to these questions. Although it might initially suggest a rock
bottom of condition and fortune, wretchedness also connects to the
idea of contradiction. As Simone Weil explains in Gravity and Grace,
which offers just one possible philosophical and spiritual glossary
for Tichý’s otherwise relentlessly corporeal text, “Contradiction
alone is the proof that we are not everything. Contradiction is our
wretchedness, and the sense of our wretchedness is the sense of
reality. For we do not invent our wretchedness. It is true. That is
why we have to value it. All the rest is imaginary.” The hint she
drops in this quote serving as the novel’s epigraph—that
wretchedness contains lighter notes than we might suppose—is fully
explored by Tichý as he develops Cody and the other characters
around him.
At the novel’s
outset, a meeting between Cody and a junkie triggers a series of
memories and reflections that jump between timelines and bodies,
marrying the reverent sanctuaries of high culture with the chaos and
viscera of the streets. The Weilian theory of wretchedness and
contradiction plays out first in this meeting and then repeatedly
throughout the events, both past and present, of the rest of the
novel: I am also my opposite, I am contradiction, and so I am
wretchedness itself; I am wretchedness itself, but neither simply nor
damningly. In the present, Cody goes to a concert with colleagues who
share his enthusiasm for music, but there is a palpable distance
between them caused by their distinct social backgrounds and
emphasized by how thoroughly they disappear when Cody enters the
realm of memory, which is the novel’s most prevalent setting.
Like Tichý, Cody is
a Czech immigrant to Sweden. However, he identifies not with any
community organized around nation, language, color, or class, but
rather with a different sort of group: that of the “failed
abortions,” which is to say the sons and daughters of hardworking
immigrants who are so disenchanted with the dreams of security and
comfort their parents sacrificed their bodies and hours for and who
have so internalized Swedish society’s disdain for them that each
one flails to discover how to spend their time on the streets of
Malmö. At one point, Cody and a friend discuss a disparaging
newspaper article they read as youths about the immigrant
neighborhoods where they grew up: “it didn’t just say RUBBISH
DUMP, it said more than that, it said much more, there were so many
words, they were black on white, and the words were HUMAN and RUBBISH
DUMP . . . and you know, my dad said to me that now we’ve come to
PARADISE, but in the paper they wrote that it was a HUMAN RUBBISH
DUMP.” Somewhere in this contradiction between paradise and a
rubbish dump lies the community that raised them and that can be
their only source of a sense of self, even if it is an impoverished
one.
Cody, now a
classical musician with a coin and a cigarette to spare, has often
been in the position of the junkie he meets, who just got into a
fight and does not know where he will sleep. These apparently
contradictory characters tumble around, head over heels, inside of
Cody in a version of the spiritual struggle that Weil refers to when
talking about wretchedness and contradiction. Tichý, however, makes
this theory more concrete as contradiction in the novel is neither
binary nor dialectical but circular and generative, like a Celtic
knot. The connection between opposites is more intimate than Marx
would allow—and there’s plenty of half-rejected Marxism here—but
also more interdependent than other political projects normally
conceive of it. Wretchedness sits at the limits of what a human can
tolerate, but it is also located within human inadequacy and
inconsequentiality—sites where one could just as well find truth,
divine love, and even saintliness. Tichý does not glorify
wretchedness for the simple reason that it is not redemptive by
itself. It is instead an unalienable fact that, once realized, can
force one to confront oneself and play an active role in that
relationship rather than letting one’s environment determine it.
Cody takes advantage of this opportunity, and while Weil argues that
the existence of God gives this process its redemptive power, Tichý
remains agnostic on this topic, only mentioning God in the context of
swearing or when equating its reality with that of unicorns.
The “rubbish dump”
article, for instance, reminds Cody’s friend Soot, likely a lover
as well as another junkie he’s nearly given up for lost, of how
they used to dumpster dive
where people
threw away things that weren’t totally broken, that hadn’t fallen
apart, not completely anyway, things that could still be used, things
that could be fixed, repurposed, used in some way or other, and one
of us, or two of us, or all three, depending on whether we had to
keep watch or not, jumped into the dumpster and lifted out junk and
trash and looked for things that worked, and we were ashamed, it was
that whole thing with the human rubbish dump and shit again, you know
what I mean I think, and sometimes we didn’t find anything, and
sometimes we found something, and if we happened to find something we
could take home and make use of we got to feel ashamed every time we
looked at the thing.
Soot connects the
article to this experience of dumpster diving “because even if
everyone knew it was a human rubbish dump, this place, you didn’t
wanna look like a tramp.” But there is a more symbolic relationship
between the article and the action: Cody and Soot have already
established an equivalence, or at the very least the basis for a
comparison, between human lives and discarded objects. Dismissed by
society because they search for and recuperate inanimate objects
whose value has been overlooked, Cody and Soot themselves lead the
reader to consider how such a mission might be applied to animate
“objects.” Yet even that mission never reaches the level of a
redemption since neither the “object” nor the one recuperating it
ever transcends the shame of disposability. This dance between worth
and worthlessness, judged both internally and externally, for the
elusive prize of being deemed valuable is precisely the understanding
of wretchedness as contradiction that both Weil and Tichý
articulate.
In this memory and
others, Cody relinquishes his first-person voice, as if allowing
himself to be possessed. No quotation marks separate dialogue from
narration as other characters perform unstoppable monologues where
they refer to themselves as “I” and to Cody as “you” or even
occasionally use his name. In effect, Cody is dislocated—or rather,
dislocates himself—from his person, which is another nod to Weil.
This body-switching, by negating the dichotomy between subject and
object, rejects a hierarchy of characters within both a work of art
and society itself, and it can happen in an instant:
I was there when
Laila, in pure desperation, cut her tongue out – swallowing blood
in such large quantities is no good for the body, cos the body, the
stomach, can’t handle it, it’s too much iron or something, you
start feeling ill, you get nauseous, you get sick, and now my mouth
is full of it, of that taste of iron and names and places, of events
and movements, of memories and images, I have a mouth full of the
tongue she cut off, I have a head full of blood, I see it the whole
time, I have waking dreams about it in the day and I dream about it
at night, my head is full of it, Cody, I have a mouth full of blood,
I have a mouth full of earth, I have a mouth full of you.
Even though Soot is
the “I” here, nothing distinguishes his speech from Cody’s, so
it is easy to forget who actually speaks these words until Soot says
Cody’s name. Blurring the boundaries between the two creates an
affinity beyond empathy since Cody, too, has in his mouth the flavors
of substances that are more metaphorical but no less toxic.
Elsewhere, Tichý
deploys allusion to confront the challenge of creating a work that
does not objectify suffering. But rather than transforming the text
into a puzzle that is only decodable if the reader possesses a
sufficient stockpile of cultural capital, these series of references
have the unexpected effect of asserting the text’s radical
accessibility. It’s rare that a reader will be familiar with the
full range of his formidable personal canon, which includes both the
Italian avant garde and Czech rap, but Cody poses a crucial
invitation to the reader: “google it.” (Actually, Cody asks the
reader to google “the final station” at the end of the train line
in Prague where he comes from, the sort of place “decision-makers
never come from.”) Once offered, the invitation stands to enter his
world: one allusion becomes a dare to educate oneself about another,
and in this way he bridges worlds while critiquing them, making them
accessible instead of appropriating them.
For those of us who
believe there are institutions and systems governing and safeguarding
our lives, it can come as a shock—and one that is perhaps best
forgotten quickly—to realize how fragile and inadequate they are.
Such systems nurture within them their own weakness: the resistance
of those of us who are not served by them, those often rejected by
society who rely on more resilient modes of living that, however
imperfectly, address real needs and value real skills. This is
wretchedness on the broader scale of a nation or culture, and it is
the endlessly regenerating, irresolvable, and often ugly
contradiction to which this novel bears witness. Although
wretchedness is often understood as the condition of those rejected
as slackers, junkies, criminals, terrorists, and worse, Tichý
retrieves it from the dumpster, restores some measure of its value,
puts it to use, and, ashamed, continues to side-eye it. - Lindsay
Semel
https://www.asymptotejournal.com/criticism/andrzej-tichy-wretchedness/
The Swedish
novelist Andrzej Tichy’s fourth novel, his first to be translated
into English, is a short, destabilising book. It begins
conventionally enough. A cellist named Cody waits for two friends by
a canal in Malmo. He has just finished rehearsing a piece by the
Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi and is on his way to a performance
of work by Arvo Pärt and John Cage. Chin-scratching music. As he
waits a homeless man approaches him and asks for money. They have a
conversation, and then the novel melts into the past, drifting
between Cody’s memories — some real, others seemingly imagined —
and between people and places.Cody — or one of his imagined
alternative personalities — grew up on a council estate, a “hard,
lurching place” where, in his youth, he and his friends took drugs,
got into fights and graffitied. Some of his peers have since gone to
prison or on to harder drugs, but Cody has extricated himself from
his origins, becoming a freelance musician and drifting between
cities across Europe: London, Berlin, Glasgow (all of which are
evoked here with an insider’s familiarity). There are no quotation
marks or paragraph breaks to aid navigation, and it’s often
difficult to work out who is thinking or speaking. The effect is not
quite a stream-of-consciousness: more like a chorus, or the
collective memory of a fever dream.If it sounds like a daunting
proposition, the novel is made somewhat navigable by the ear Tichy
has for voice and the rhythms of language, and the attention he pays
to the specificities of natural speech. Wretchedness is a deeply
musical book (there’s even an accompanying Spotify playlist: a
mixture of old school hip-hop and mid-century European avant-garde),
and it is testament to Nichola Smalley’s skill that this musicality
survives translation. The idiomatic registers of translated fiction
can often feel false or dated, especially when translators reach for
generic or transatlantic slang to try to make universal what should
be singular and idiosyncratic. Smalley goes the opposite way,
rendering Tichy’s street-lyricism into a kind of super-specific
London English: “rock up” meaning “arrive”; “well” used
as an intensifier, “creased” for laughter, “mans” for people,
“shotted” for sold. It is deft and feels entirely
appropriate.Wretchedness is structured like a piece of music too.
Images recur throughout like musical phrases, taking on more
significance as the novel progresses. Formally the technique is
reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves: another novel of voices
and thoughts, in which characters dissolve into and out of each
other. Every so often an essay on the effects of music, or the
legacies of racism in Sweden, or the dark poetry of the tabloid
press, intrudes.
This narrative
uncertainty can be read as a measure of an anxiety Tichy has
expressed elsewhere, over whose stories he feels able to tell, and
how fine the line is between writing about a life and appropriating
it. In interviews he has described the book as a way of challenging
the common understanding of Sweden as a liberal, equitable society,
free from the kinds of social and political inequalities that beset
the rest of Europe.There’s a slight tension in the way Wretchedness
revels in its descriptions of drug use, violence and casual racism
while being suspicious of the cultural appropriations associated with
certain kinds of gritty literary fiction. One character, a graffiti
artist named Soot, laments the way those who write about the wretched
lives of his peers often end up stealing their stories. Writers and
academics come for “the latest hot story, juicy tale, personal,
private, honest and raw — but simply and straightforwardly told”,
and “in return the teller gets to stroke their soft clothing, to
sniff the mimosa and the hyacinth and the lily of the valley they
keep in their editors’ offices, which those silent cleaners, our
mums and dads, have wiped clean with their aching bodies”. Is it a
betrayal to make art out of broken, marginalised lives? It depends
how you go about it, and on the whole Wretchedness is a sensitive and
compelling attempt. - Jon Day
https://www.ft.com/content/fdd777c5-b24e-43ce-a985-3fdfd791263d
I swapped a couple
of books from and other stories for a copy of the TLS I had that
included a review of this book in I have met Nochola the translator
of this book via her work at And other stories a couple of times, so
it is a shame it has taken me a while to get to a review of books she
has translated. looking up about the writer I came across this quote
which seemed to sum him up as a writer. “Andrzej Tichý is a writer
who, time and time again, with a language that sings, says something
important about the Swedish contemporary. Read him”. He has lived
in Sweden since 1981 born in Prague to a Polish mother and Czech
father there is a sense of the great Mittel European writers in his
work.
The way the
wax plant flowers moved, those small movements, that trembling, that
gentle vibrating, like an echo of the moving trings, combined with
the low-frequency tone, the rumble – all that lingered in my
consciousness as I saw the newly built tower block and the figures on
its roof, with the railway tracks and rail yard in the background,
all while I tried to say something to the guitarist and the composer
about scelsi and my microtonal worl. We walked toward the central
station to take the the train to Copenhagen, to Vor Frue Kirke and
the moosmann concert.
Where he meets
the Junkie and his past falls back into his world and those year
flood back.
This book is told in
a feverish manner at times what happened when a cellist comes face to
face with a spun out Junkie for the second book in a row we have a
sort of Proustian moment where this one single event leads the
Ccellist into a journey through his past and the sense that he broke
free of it a part of growing up in the Housing projects with a group
of what in the day would be slackers this is an ode to the early
nineties and the urban world he grew up in of skaters, junkies,
rappers. Where there are Parties and clubs but he remembers that it
was also a road to nowhere, as the memories of his past come tumbling
in on him. This is all told in slang as we see his early jobs also
the tension of the multi-cultural community he lives in just bubbling
below the surface. He is the present is due to give a concert with
two other musicians of the work Giacinto Scelsi the Italian modernist
composer. This a story of breaking out but also the sense of loss of
the comrade brothers he left behind in the melting post he grew up
in.
THen a car pulled
up. A man got out and other things. Then a car pulled. A man got out
and asked if they wanted work. Employment, he said, Earn a little
money, he said, they asked what they’d be doing.. Handing out
flyers, he said. For his building firm. Go aroundthe wealthy
neighbourhoods and stuff a few flyers through letterboxes. They asked
how much they’d get five hundred. To share. Course we will, they
said. That’s a lot of money, they thought. They got in the car. He
drove them to the wealthy neighbourhood. They got a stack each. Took
a side each and put them in the letterboxesas he drove behind them,
crept along along slowly behind them
A classic
ilustration of GEnration X the McJobs cash in hand jobs struggling to
get by.
A lot of reviews I
have seen of this book have mentioned Bernhard it hard not to avoid
that as the book is told in a similar style of breathless prose, as
the past comes flooding into his mind but jumbled up like a montage
of his life with no real gaps as you get caught up in the cellist’s
past and his thoughts of the world he grew up in. This is like a
sample of his past mixtape of memories. The clash of high and low
culture is shown here from his early love of street beats of the hip
hop of the day over the modern music of Scelsi (I will put my hand up
again her I know nothing of him just what I have read my modern
classical knowledge is little) and the hip hop he likes is different
to the bands I knew at the time but it reminds me of going to clubs
in UK, Holland, and Germany late nights. Then time spent in cities
like Manchester, Newcastle, Nimwegen, Kassel, and Dortmund at the
similar time to this so the group he described remind me of my german
friends although we didn’t do drugs we like a drink and clubs. This
is a song about breaking free of the past. But there will always be
that reminder of the past.
Winstons score –
A- ( a Bernhard fan got score well with me)
https://winstonsdad.wordpress.com/2021/03/08/wretchedness-by-andrzej-tichy/
