Louis Armand – The Combinations (Equus Reissue, 2024)
It’s been eight years since the first publication of Louis Armand’s “attempted novel” The Combinations. An epic work, consisting of 888 pages, broken into 64 chapters and 8 octaves; one would be forgiven if, having started it eight years ago, one were only just reaching the end.
Built upon a substructure of numerology, alchemical transformations, chess, dialectics and spin, the reissue (neatened, tightened, re-edited and re-packaged) relaunches at a suitable time. The numerology around the “8” is of clear significance here. Yet, being a novel of endless contradictions and combinations, one is not quite sure how.
One thing is certain, however; one cannot step into the same river twice. The Combinations returns, not as the same thing over, but as a new novel, at a new time, consisting, in a Borges-like paradox, of mostly the same words, phrases, and characters.
Armand’s The Combinations is a holy mountain of a novel. A seemingly endless maze of twists and turns, ascents and descents, through which only the bravest may pass.
It’s been called “the ultimate Prague novel”. The most relevant, certainly, for our times.
We accompany our protagonist, Němec, through the post-’89 streets of Prague; streets haunted by Nazi Reichsprotektors, Communist torturers, Zhyddish cemeteries, renaissance alchemists, and suitcases full of imperialist pounds and capitalist dollars.
“Blitz the highways,” reads a Mercedes Benz poster. “All ideologies are false,” the superintendent tells us, “but some are more false than others…”.
Prague is a city of endless contrasts and contradictions. The grandiosity of Armand’s vision is such that nothing is missed, nothing excluded; all is laid out: combinations on combinations on combinations.”
If you missed it the first time, of even if you didn’t, now is your opportunity to read this great work of paradoxical fiction at the time at which it will be most relevant: right now.
– Joe Darlington
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