During one of several metafictional digressions jokily interrogating the nature of The Combinations itself, Armand says that Nemec is “somehow unreal”. The Combinations attempts to give most of these riddlers and crackpots space, jostling on the crammed pages alongside the strangely blank and insubstantial Nemec. He’s been sent on a quest to unlock the secrets of the Voynich manuscript, here described as composed “by an Unknown Author, in an Unknown Language” and which has, “over the course of its moderately long history, attracted the various attentions of occultists, amateur riddlers, pseudoscientists and crackpots of every stripe from the four corners of the globe”. To borrow one of Armand’s most frequently recurring images, Nemec is playing a game of chess with no clear idea of the size of the board or the rules. There are grand political and moral themes here, as well as more personal explorations of loneliness, loss and intellectual instability. The soul in question belongs to a man called Nemec, who wanders around a city very similar to Armand’s home city, Prague (here called Golem City) while attempting to come to terms with a world without moorings. His anti-novel The Combinations sets out to investigate – among other things – the psychological fallout from the collapse of communism and the more intimate breakdown of a lost soul. Englisch.L ouis Armand’s themes are as big as his novel is long. 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. 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.
Reinhard) of the 20th (who attempted and succeeded in turning flesh into soap).
Edward) of the 16th/17th centuries (who attempted and failed to turn lead into gold), and the infamous H's (e.g.
Golem City, the ship of fools boarded by the famed D's (e.g. 'Golem City'), across the 20th-century and before/after. 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. Shortlisted for the 2016 Not the Booker prize. The 'European anti-novel' in all its unrepentant glory is here in THE COMBINATIONS, following in the tradition of Sterne, Rabelais, Cervantes, Joyce, Perec. nach der Bestellung gedruckt Neuware - Printed after ordering - Fiction.
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