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Fiction. Drama. Art. The "European anti-novel" in all its unrepentant glory is here in THE COMBINATIONS, following in the tradition of Sterne, Rabelais, Cervantes, Joyce, Perec. Shortlisted for the 2016 Not the Booker prize.
In 8 octaves, 64 chapters and 888 pages, Louis Armand's THE COMBINATIONS is an unprecedented "work of attempted fiction" that combines the beauty & intellectual exertion that is chess with the panorama of futility & chaos that is Prague (a.k.a. "Golem City"), across the 20th-century and before/after. Golem City, the ship of fools boarded by the famed D's (e.g. John) and K's (e.g. Edward) of the 16th/17th centuries (who attempted and failed to turn lead into gold), and the infamous H's (e.g. Adolf, e.g. Reinhard) of the 20th (who attempted and succeeded in turning flesh into soap). Armand's prose weaves together the City's thousand-and- one fascinating tales with a deeply personal account of one lost soul set adrift amid the early-90s' awakening from the nightmare that was the previous half-century of communist Mitteleuropa. THE COMBINATIONS is a text whose 1) erudition dazzles, 2) structure humbles, 3) monotony never bores, 4) humour disarms, 5) relentlessness overwhelms, 6) storytelling captivates, 7) poignancy remains poignant, and 8) style simply never exhausts itself. Your move, Reader.
About the author
Louis Armand is a writer and visual artist who has lived in Prague since 1994. He has worked as an editor and publisher, and as a subtitles technician at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, and is an editor of
VLAK magazine. He is the author of eight novels, including
Breakfast at Midnight in 2012, a perfect modern noir, presenting Kafka's Prague as a bleak, monochrome singularity of darkness, despair and edgy, dry existentialist hardboil (Richard Marshall,
3: AM), CAIRO (Equus Press, 2014; short listed for the
Guardian's Not-the-Booker Prize), and THE COMBINATIONS (Equus Press, 2016). Described as Robert Pinget does Canetti (in drag in Yugoslavia), Armand's third novel
Clair Obscur was published by Equus in 2011. His previous novel,
Menudo (Antigen), was hailed as unrelenting, a flying wedge, an encyclopaedia of the wasteland, an uzi assault pumping desolation lead... inspiring! (Thor Garcia, author of
The News Clown).
