Book Club: Award-winning Swedish writer Andrzej Tichý unflinchingly explores class mobility and clash

His debut novel Wretchedness, a polyphonic reckoning with race, class and belonging in contemporary Sweden was longlisted for the International Booker Prize. Here Tichý expands his deeply evocative, poetic writing on the experiences of those at society’s margins with new characters, perspectives, and forms of writing. It’s a bracing and profoundly moving thing to behold. If this interests you, Tichý will be in Sheffield on 13 August for publisher And Other Stories’ Sheffield Summer Party at La Biblioteka, along with Tim Etchells. More information can be found below.

[Extract]

Every time I approach a car on a bend I imagine us colliding head-on. It’s either me, veering over to the left-hand side of the road, or the approaching car – whose driver has fallen asleep or is drunk or is trying to commit suicide – that veers over to the right. Then, regardless of how fast I’ve been driving, I slow down so I’m going at just under eighty kilometres an hour, because I once heard a science journalist interviewing a researcher who said that the chance of surviving a head-on collision is violently reduced if the vehicle is travelling at a rate of over eighty kilometres an hour. Violently reduced. Could she really have said that? Or did she use the word violently to describe the slope of the curve in the graph that correlated death and head-on collisions?

Or was it maybe survival and head-on collisions? I don’t recall, but I often think about it, as I’m rounding the bend, preparing myself for a crash, for a head-on collision, for either death or survival, and wonder if this applies to both vehicles or just one of them, because if it applies to both it’s over regardless, since no one, or at least as good as no one, only half-blind ninety-five-year-olds and anally retentive pedants, sticks to the speed limit on these seventy kilometre- an-hour roads.

Not even me, at the mercy of these thoughts and images every time I meet another car on a bend. On the straight sections I drive as fast as I can, and then I slow down again on the bends. I slow down and speed up, and slow down and speed up, and so it goes on, as though I were waging a battle, a low-key battle with myself. Then sometimes I think about my brother.

My brother, a critic and lecturer in literary studies, working in a field that, despite his anxious assertions, can only be described as an obscure part of an increasingly irrelevant, castle-in-the-clouds area of public life.

He always says that all people, whether or not they are conscious of it, understand life as a battle between two sides. Between rich and poor, for example. Between men and women, labour and capital. Between reality and illusion, between devout and unbelieving. Or, in the case of intellectuals, between those who think and those who are incapable of mental activity. The ranks of the affected. Those who remain stuck in, as he says, ressentiment and reaction.

His words touch upon a discussion we’ve been having since our teens. Back then, it was a recurring ritual in which we playfully fell into traditional gender roles – probably a way for us to deal with the fact that we both, in various ways, transgressed these roles. Me as a mouthy, taekwondo-training ‘tomboy’; him with his slender-limbed awkwardness and cerebral air.

‘Hey,’ I say then to my brother, since I’m not particularly interested in that game any more, ‘the only battle that interests me is the struggle of common sense and good against idiocy and evil. Or, if you prefer different terminology, I might say the struggle of truth and compassion, or maybe of restraint and silence, of reverence and circumspection, of contemplation and prayer, of humility or even the savagely resigned grin, against the torrential and cascading verbal diarrhoea that pours forth whenever intellectuals set up their soap-boxes.’

And we go on like this, squabbling. But afterwards I often regret the harsh words. Because I know his superior attitude is just a role he slips into to hide his insecurity, his fear of dying alone, in some dingy room he’s renting temporarily or in some equally dingy apartment he lives in alone, an apartment that reminds him of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties, when our dad lived in a so-called bachelor’s hostel. Dad’s neighbours made a big impression on us.

They were all friendly, smiling and (in our eyes) big men. Most were alcoholics, addicts, mentally ill or troubled in some way or another. And since then I’ve thought of all these tramps you see around as my family members, on some inaccessible, hidden level.

I know it sounds pathetic and empty, but that’s how I think and feel. It’s not something I’m in the habit of talking about. Just like with those compulsive thoughts on the bends. My brother, on the other hand, he seems to harbour some kind of hatred for these fallen people. A hatred which is also self-contempt, of course. And fear that he too will fall, in spite of his academy and his World Literature. ‘Don’t be so afraid,’ I say to him. ‘What are you afraid of? Loneliness? Death? Or is it survival?’

The And Other Stories Sheffield Summer Party will take place at La Biblioteka, 61 Eyre Lane, S1 3GF, from 6:30pm BST, with readings from Andrzej Tichý and Tim Etchells.