WRETCHEDNESS

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.