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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