Louis Armand (1) (1972–)

GlassHouse by Louis Armand

“Coffined thoughts around me, in mummycases, embalmed in spice of words.”
Ulysses (1922), by James Joyce

“By turns gnarled, tuberous, the mythic upturned baobab enfolded the sky[.]” So begins GlassHouse by Louis Armand. A taut miniature, it stands opposite The Combinations, Armand’s magnum opus (all 888 pages worth), a Ulysses-manque, a dizzying doorstopper skewering the false promises of Cold War soteriological half-truths (communism and capitalism; democracy and tyranny), with a wandering schlemiel in Prague. It’s, well … a lot. GlassHouse, by contrast, is a short book (128) pages, but within is a phantasmorgia, sex-murder, mob violence, and ants.

Split into three parts, the first part is pure detective noir. A body of an elementary school teacher is discovered in the Jardin des Plantes at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelles. Detectives Schönbrunn and Laborde are called in to investigate. Schönbrunn is pissed, because it’s he’s hungover, sleep-deprived, and it’s his day off. Laborde, his partner, is an obese hatemonger, an ice-hearted repository of contempt and ridicule for women and minorities, despite a perceptive acumen and the possibility of being right in his hunches. The museum staff are shocked at the developments, along with an accumulating crowd on the outskirts of the crime scene.

The museum staff include: Yadlun, an absentminded taxonomist; Madame Lenoir, his caretaker; Godemiché, aspiring subaltern gunning for Yadlun’s job; and Gachette, the young beautiful intern. Gep is Lenoir’s adoptive child, mute and sullen. Qwertz is a hobo with a spectacular and convoluted, an “Aryanised vagabond” who escaped Nazi persecution. Mahnood, an Arab, may or may not be an alien.

The first section pingpongs perspectives, one character to the next a la As I Lay Dying. Armand gives each character an idiosyncratic narrative style. Qwertz, for examples, rattles off a stream of consciousness reminiscent of Celine’s trademark three dots. “With an open suitcase full of Reichsmarks cuffed to left ankle …. Too hungry …. To care …. stuffing his face, right there in the fetid August corpse-stink, six years undead with a gut-ache & drunk as a fart, puking all over when the partisans burst in … Annus miserabilis of ‘44.”

Gep, meanwhile, contemplates:

“Running running running.
The park,
the animals behind fences, courtyard with victim cats
& old broken guy
on a chair
in the sky,
blinking wet-eyed down at him
like God.”

And so on. This fractured narrative continues until mob violence erupts and the curated order of the Jardin collapses into chaos and slaughter. The focus shifts from noir to a disorienting array of perspectives; a kaleidoscope vision of ants, punk rock fish-people, a corpse, and the mob.

“[ ] Words are rushing [ ] at the speed of light [ ] yet thought stands still. [ ] A trillion neurons [ ] in a fixed firmament. [ ]” So says François X, aka, the victim.

A chapter called “The Hole” is ostensibly about the hole dug by the construction crew, but it becomes a free-associative word stew reaching a cognitive critical mass:

“its desires were fathomless once brought to light. dug-up trepanned archaeologised. secrets left to chance. occult wells of air. a will-always-done. points without contradiction. hieratic moons. a cross on sharpened stone. dawn birdsong.”

Recalling Pierre Guyotat’s transgressive fiction, a question arises: What does it mean? We, the reader, must contend with a word-river that may have meaning, multiple meanings, or no meaning. Must a passage mean something to have literary value? Must this section possess meaning because GlassHouse is, at least on a superficial level, a mystery? Who murdered the elementary school teacher? Is knowing this necessary for the storytelling to succeed? Or, like Lost Highway or Inland Empire, is the search for narrative meaning a deeper compulsion/demand/threat from the reader to the author for an explanation? “I don’t understand! Explain this to me!” In the words of Raoul Duke in Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, “Fuck, man. You've gone completely sideways!”

GlassHouse is a neo-noir phantasmorgia, Faulknerian and Lynchian by turns, written by a scholar of James Joyce and the avant-garde. Don’t expect any hand-holding or infodumps to clarify the situation. Although one shouldn’t take that as a reason to avoid reading the short book. In fact, like the works of Gilbert Sorrentino or Anthony Burgess, this metafictional odyssey is actually quite fun to read. It is a mystery story, but it is also a frenzied ode to the majesty and convolutions of language.

https://driftlessareareview.com/2021/07/06/glasshouse-by-louis-armand/… (més)

Opening Moves, Countermoves, and Provocations

Move: The Combinations continues the literary heritage of erudite doorstoppers.
Countermove: Page count doesn’t mean profundity.
Move: The Combinations exemplifies the encyclopedic and labyrinthine novel. Notable antecedents include Gargantua and Pantagruel (c. 1532 – c. 1564), Moby Dick (1851), Ulysses (1922), Infinite Jest (1996), and The Royal Family (2000).
Countermove: Even the avant-garde is old hat by now. (To paraphrase Cynthia Ozick.)
Provocation: The Combinations is the greatest novel of the 21st century.

Under the Influence

The Combinations has …

footnotes aplenty like David Foster Wallace.
typographic tomfoolery like the works of William T. Vollmann.
a city as a thematic and narrative unity (see Ulysses).
an overly schematized arrangement (also Ulysses).
conspiracies (Robert Anton Wilson) and labyrinths (Jorge Luis Borges).
paranoia and bureaucratic obfuscation (Franz Kafka).
a hapless schlemiel as the ersatz protagonist (Thomas Pynchon’s V.).

The Skeleton Key to The Combinations
“totalitarianism makes art into an obscenity, capitalism makes it idiotic…” – https://atelierlouisarmand.wordpress.com/


diagram-of-chess-board-setup
Via

The Chessboard; or Psychogeography

Prague is currently part of the Czech Republic, but because of its central location on the European continent it has been a part in various empires (economic, political, etc.). Using the Battle of White Mountain as a starting point, this timeline will illustrate the assorted regimes that ruled over Golem City.

8 November 1620: The Battle of White Mountain. Decisive victory for Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor and Catholic Allies.

1348 – 1918: Lands of the Bohemian Crown (aka Czech Lands)

1348 – 1806: States of the Holy Roman Empire

1526 – 1804: Crown Lands of the Hapsburg Monarchy

1618 – 1648: The Thirty Years War

1648: Peace of Westphalia: Cessation of hostilities between Catholic and Protestant monarchies in Europe. Unofficial birth of the modern concept of the nation-state.

1803 – 1814: The Napoleonic Wars

1804 – 1867: Crown Lands of the Austrian Empire

September 1814: Congress of Vienna: Post-Napoleonic Europe is redrawn; a status quo ante is attempted with the reconstitution of conservative autocratic-leaning monarchies.

1867 – 1918: Crown Lands of the Cisleithanian part of Austria-Hungary

1914 – 1918: The First World War (aka The Great War; aka The War to End All Wars). Tribal warfare between violence-prone dynastic lunatics and the senseless butchery of soldiers gullible enough to think they’d “be home by Christmas.”

28 June 1919: Versailles Treaty: Austria-Hungary broken up into several nations roughly along ethnic lines. The victors also carved up the Ottoman Empire into easily digestible, easily dominated puppet regimes for more efficient economic plunder.

1918 – 1938: First Czechoslovak Republic

1929 – 1939: The Great Depression

1938 – 1939: Second Czechoslovak Republic

1939 – 1945: The Second World War

1939 – 1945: Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (Nazi puppet state)

1945 – 1949: Third Czechoslovak Republic

1945 – 1992: Czechoslovakia

July to August 1945: The Potsdam Agreement

1945 – 1989: The Cold War: Europe, and by extension the world, split into US- and USSR-dominated spheres of domination.

1948 – 1990: Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (Soviet puppet state)

1958 / 1993 / 2009: The formation and expansion of the European Union. Europe gradually moves towards economic and political unity. Nothing bad ever happens again on the European continent. All problems solved and opponents bested. Once more … with feeling!

1989: Fall of the Berlin Wall

1991: Collapse of the Soviet Union

1991 – 2001: The Interregnum. The End of History. Capitalism Triumphant. Pax Americana.

1990 – 1992: Czech and Slovak Federative Republic

The Amicable Divorce:

1 January 1993: The Czech Republic

1 January 1993: Slovakia

2001 – Present: The War on Terror. The Forever War. Like the War on Drugs, a never-ending cash-hemorrhaging spectacle offering a militarized mindset with little positive net results.

2009 – Present: The Great Recession (It may have ended earlier. Depends on who you talk to and their respected tax bracket.)

Some Personal Thoughts

The Combinations took me a very, very long time to read. I’d read it for a while, abandon it to read another book, and then come back. Each time I returned, it would be like I hadn’t left. Every time I’d pick up the book again, I’d be transported to the streets of Prague (aka Golem City) as I followed the misadventures of Němec, a hapless schlemiel harried by spirit of the Prof. This literary duo was equal parts Dante and Virgil and Vladimir and Estragon. I’d be drawn in immediately, the outside world vanishing while I read about Golem City and the forces that shaped it.

The point of all these bullet points and the timeline is to see The Combinations from multiple perspectives. I’m just a lowly book reviewer and blogger. I fancy myself a literary critic, but in actuality I’m nothing more than an amateur enthusiast. That said, this multi-part critique of The Combinations shouldn’t be taken as the final word on the book or some Steve Jobs-esque messianic TEDTalks sales pitch. I’ve always seen the practice of criticism as a means to foment discussions and debate, not end them. My essay on this huge, detail-crammed, and labyrinthine text doesn’t aim to be authoritative, definitive, or all-encompassing. It will simply be the individual view of a passionate non-expert.

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Mid-game Mitteleuropa Miasma

But first … some quotes:

“This sprawling, self-consciously avant garde novel is the product of serious thought, but it’s also terribly overwritten – and much more traditional than it thinks.” – Sam Jordison, The Guardian

“Ulysses has served since its publication as the ideal for serious writers, and the twentieth century is littered with magnum opuses that have been written under its sway, and that have marked the nadir of their various writers’ careers.” – Dale Peck, Hatchet Jobs

“Must we wring the neck of a certain system in order to stuff it into a contemporary pigeon-hole, or modify the dimensions of that pigeon-hole for the satisfaction of the analogymongers? Literary criticism is not book-keeping.” – “Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce,” Samuel Beckett

“To be is to be cornered.” – Drawn and Quartered, Emil Cioran

John Winger: C’mon, it’s Czechoslovakia. We zip in, we pick ’em up, we zip right out again. We’re not going to Moscow. It’s Czechoslovakia. It’s like going into Wisconsin.

Russell Ziskey: Well I got the shit kicked out of me in Wisconsin once. Forget it!

– Stripes (Ivan Reitman, 1981); screenplay by Len Blum, Daniel Goldberg, and Harold Ramis

Listen, Little Man!

The Combinations is a vast sprawling novel, 64 chapters, 888 pages, and a convoluted plot taking place in Prague, a city beset by ghosts, history, conspiracies, and a fascinating literary history. The novel centers on the misadventures of Němec, a hapless schlemiel caught up in events beyond his control, mirroring the troubled history of Czechoslovakia, a pawn too-easily sacrificed to the whims of ideological assertiveness and Cold War spheres of influence. “Mongo pawn in game of life.”

Throughout the novel Němec deals with the prodding, harassment, and riddles from Prof, a ghostly angel of history surveying the wreckage of history with jokes, clues, and asides. Němec and Prof represent another installment of Hero and Sidekick, joining the likes of:

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza

Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus

The Tick and Arthur

Gaius Baltar and Head Six

In this mock-heroic quest, Němec must solve the mystery about the Prof’s death. That’s the plot in a nutshell. But novels of this sort are never really about plot, at least the forward-progressive movement resulting in the predictable narrative climax and denouement. It’s a sort of thriller, the sort of thriller in the mold of Crying of Lot 49 or Pattern Recognition. It’s less about the destination than the ride. And, holy shit!, what a ride!

(The Combinations ranks on my Holy Shit-O-Meter! in close proximity with Ada, or Ardor, by Vladimir Nabokov and Against Nature, by Joris-Karl Huysmans.)

Before engaging in the aforementioned quest, Němec must first deal with the vagaries of personal freedom. He has left the confines of a state-run mental institution and found himself plopped in post-Communist Prague. Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union and the independence of its former client states, the onrush of Capitalism and Democracy have not ushered in a New Jerusalem. This is less about the Invisible Hand and all its glories, but about a new globalized economy bringing “corpses to the banquet” (to steal the poetics of literary genius/epic poet/anti-Semitic traitor/fascist tool/crank economist Ezra Pound).

Along the way, Němec forages through the Prof’s old apartment and finds a copy of the Voynich Manuscript. Yet The Combinations barely dwells on this epic revelation before it dives into another digression, another character’s rant, and another fever dream. Plot becomes less a propulsive force than an inconsequential encumbrance. The Combinations blasts apart the trendy creative writing technique known as “invisible style.” This is a novel written in a self-consciously exuberant and excessive style. While parallels with Ulysses are inevitable, the mock-heroics hew closer to Gargantua and Pantagruel. While Rabelais mocked the holy trinity of Church, Monarchy, and Academia, Armand skewers contemporary sacred cows like Soviet Communism, Western Free-Market Capitalism, and the Literary Form.

Němec may be hapless, but he’s not stupid. An early chapter has him prowling the Klementinum Library in search of information about Jan Mydlář, an executioner under Emperor Rudolf. (The details are in Chapter 3: Poppylopping. Later in the novel, we revisit another Lord High Executioner, Reinhard Heydrich, in Chapter 30: Pragerschinken. For all of its verbal pyrotechnics and stylistic churrigueresco, there resides an underlying narrative schemata. Just don’t burden me with creating some Stuart Gilbert-esque schemata for the book. I’ll let better heads prevail in the groves of academe … or, better yet, have a fanatical vanguard author a Wikia, replete with annotations, sources, wild mass guesses, and organizational taxonomic rhizomatic reverie.)

Our hero is a not-quite-sane vagabond battered about by forces high and low. He wanders, he listens, and he contemplates. Throughout he struggles with the false promises of overarching ideologies and his place in a strange new world not of his making.

Occupy Golem City

Prague plays center stage in this epic novel. The psychogeography of Golem City reflects amid the aimless wanderings of Němec, the urban landscapes more relevant than the gossamer-thin plot. Armand paints Prague as Mitteleuropäisch fever dream, a city whose location and history have made it a pivot on which empires turn. Prague has been a cog within the Holy Roman Empire, Austro-Hungarian Empire, Nazism’s Greater Germany, and the Soviet Empire. The little nation has also been a pawn international alliances have been all too willing to sacrifice. This geopolitical vulnerability and the Machiavellian chicanery by The Great Powers has cultivated a cynical and paranoid literary heritage. Prague has Franz Kafka and the Vienna has Karl Kraus, two writers of genius giving voice to the anxiety, insanity, and bigotry calcifying within the sclerotic husk of the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the eve of the Great War.

Blecha, aka The Bugman, rants about recent history in his rooftop bower. He tells Némec:

Pogroms, just like with the Zhids, justified & legalised by that witless Beneš & his eighty-something decrees. They drove around in trucks, like Henlein’s thugs before Munich, spreading the Fear. Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer! Only now it was for the sake of the greater Sklavic socialist brotherhood. Heil Stalin! Švejks the lot of ‘em.

Later in the novel, Armand switches the frequency to that of legend and tells the story of Chesk & Lesk. These two “bucktoothed, pimply, skinnyarsed brothers from the shtetl of Chełm [were] trudging across the flat middle of fair Europa” and “happened upon a giant beetroot sticking out of the ground.”

Seizing the Means of Production; or, Applied Groucho Marxism

And here’s where we talk about political ideologies. Poor Němec, during the Communist years, was subject to “the official phrenologists who visited the Home on a monthly basis.” He exhibited the traits

of the counter-revolutionary bourgeois parasite in utero, so to speak, the diabolic egg waiting to hatch, programmed in its very genome by 1. a wilful subjversion of the People & the State, 2. a congenital exceptionalism, 3. an ingrained unnatural attachment to the first-person pronoun singular, 4. a characteristic refusal to muck in with all the other proles to get the collective dirty work done of building the Great Socialist Utopia.

When finally freed of the gray claws of Soviet Communist oppression, he finds himself in a Prague awash in capitalism and democracy. Great, right? As the Bugman says early in the novel, “All ideologies are false, but some are more false than others.” (Echoing Karl Kraus’s aphorism about truths and half-truths.)

What did the Wall crumbling bring? The words of the prophets are written on the urinal walls:

We Luv Amerika is the writing in public lavatories, cheek-by-jowl with smiley faces, telephone numbers & promises of handjobs, blowjobs, sodomy & coprophilia. The whole City was like the last stop in a shoestring road-movie running on fumes: Aňa Geislerová in a gangbanged Trabi, coal-stained Bohee tricolours tied to the exhaust pipe, Yankeedoodle stars&stripes undies waving from the aerial, doped-out hippy rainbow freedom bunting strung out the windows, Bolshie-Go-Home graffitied all over the doors, ghettoblaster blasting a medley of Franco Zapatista & late ‘80s backmasked Western Imperialist Record industry mindwash–

Armand exposes the two major ideologies of the last century – Soviet Communism and Western free-market capitalism – and turns them into burlesque. Beneath the empty slogans and commodified distractions lay only savagery and power games. The Great Recession has taken the gloss off of Post-Cold War Capitalist Triumphalism, but Capitalism remains the better of the two systems. Not the best. It also depends on selling the sales pitch. Movers and shakers in Western democracies – businessmen, politicians, etc. – commiserated with the Soviet nomenklatura during detente.

It is naïve to claim there’s no major difference between the two major systems, but it also naïve to claim one sided acted with more honor and ethics than the other side. The Soviets had their Eastern Bloc tinpot dictatorships acting at their behest; the United States had their South American dictators acting the same way. The Combinations just has the balls to say both systems suck. To borrow the famous Tolstoy line from Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Neither system has yet to provide a pain-free way of attaining the New Jerusalem, so stop trying to sell us on that.

Esoterica, Kabbalah, John Dee, Emperor Rudolf II, the Voynich Manuscript, and a Dwarf

“Like many who court the avant garde, Armand ends up disappointingly conservative. There’s little that feels new, even in spite of the relentless tide of name-checking and references. It’s all rats, alcohol, asylums, Mitteleurope, masons, Faust, alchemy, dingy laboratories, Enoch, Babbage, Hermes Trismegistus, John Dee, Rorschach blots, the sphinx, mysterious bookstores … It’s sometimes obscure, but mainly predictable.” – Sam Jordison, The Guardian

Yes, well, what were you expecting? Is this a genuine complaint? Or is this akin to saying, “Bullitt was a relentless tide of shootouts and car chases.” Or complaining film noir is too noir.

Granted, the name-checking and references can be a bit much to some readers, but it all depends on what the reader wants. The same charge can be laid against Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace, and the TV show Community, a show easily renamed as Pop Culture Reference: The Series. Jordison may be implying that all the references result in creating a work largely derivative, thus undeserving of its ambition to shoulder its way into the heroic pantheon of the literary avant garde. (But since Ulysses is fast approaching its centenary, doesn’t the additional accusation of the text’s inherent conservatism [because conservative = old] come across as bad faith?)

With all the conspiracies, wunderkammern, history, and relics filling the novel, Ezra Pound’s command to “MAKE IT NEW.” seem rather ill-placed. Němec finds himself imprisoned in the nightmare of history. Even awake, the differences, for him at least, remain superficial. Instead of struggling beneath the jackboot of Nazism or the Russification during Soviet rule, Golem City lay beneath the warm blanket of Capitalism and Democracy. “New boss / Same as the old boss,” to quote the Who song.

All the meandering, digression, and conspiracy place The Combinations more in line with a penny dreadful or a potboiler. Yet it is replete with stylistic tomfoolery and typographic variety one would see in a Danielewski or Vollmann novel. The massive novel is neither an innovative experimental work or a more traditional exemplar of bourgeois kitchen sink realism. It is neither and both, thus creating a Žižekian “short-circuit.” As the MIT Press Short Circuit series explains:

A short circuit occurs when there is a wrong connection in the network—wrong, of course, from the standpoint of the smooth functioning of the network. Is therefore the shock of short circuiting not one of the best metaphors for a critical reading? Is not one of the most efficient critical procedures to cross wires that don’t usually touch—to take a major classic (text, author, notion) and read it in a short circuiting way, through the lenses of a “minor” author, text, or conceptual apparatus (“minor” in the sense of marginalized, disavowed by the hegemonic ideology, dealing with a “lower,” less dignified topic)?

Armand achieves a kind of literary short circuit when he takes a major classic (Ulysses) and refracts it through the lens of Prague (itself replete with minor literatures: Kafka, Čapek, Meyrink; and marginalized/disavowed conceptual apparatuses: wunderkammern, conspiracy theory, cabaret, chess, alchemy, etc.). Hence Jordison’s unalloyed snark and frustration. Unable to place the work in a predetermined taxonomic box, he throws his hands up in the air and dismisses it as an overwritten doorstopper written by a wannabe James Joyce. (But does Louis Armand want to be James Joyce? It seems odd to accuse the writer of being a stylistic conservative and throwing up a novel written in 1922 as the exemplar of the literary avant garde.)

The digressions about the Voynich Manuscript, alchemy, and esoteric lore give the novel a leisurely breathing space. Like other readers, I was disappointed by The Da Vinci Code, not because of its subject matter, but because Dan Brown is a terrible writer. The Combinations hit the right spot with me. It offered conspiracies, relics, historical and mythical digressions, and ranting characters, in addition to a reckless willingness to do things unburdened by commercial demands or expectations. By turns erudite, infuriating, silly, and decadent, the novel offers the reader a feast for the imagination. The greatest pleasure is rereading passages from the book, refreshing my memory since finishing it so many months ago.

Big Books, Big Ideas … Big Deal?

At 926 pages, 888 pages plus an overture, intermission, and coda totaling 38 additional pages, The Combinations is a massive tome. Released in paperback, one could imagine the hardcover edition not only overwhelming the reader but coming in useful in hand-to-hand combat. Books like these overpower simply through their sheer physicality.

A controversial assumption underlies books of this size. Due to its large page count and high-literary pedigree (Equus Press), one would presume The Combinations is a profound work. The equation Page Count = Profundity is a dangerous thing. As with the Dale Peck quote above, aspiring author have sought Ulysses by James Joyce as a popular model. But not every novel aspiring to Ulysses has succeeded. Jerusalem by Alan Moore case in point. (Capsule review: A flaming shitburger of a novel.) Or turgid, overwritten monstrosities like Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. (Beloved by philistine sociopaths masquerading as philosophers.)

As a side-note, I’m also a fan of the big and exuberant. Some of my favorite culture products include: The Cremaster Cycle by Matthew Barney; Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness by the Smashing Pumpkins; and Angels in America by Tony Kushner. My biases lean towards the large and complex. (I love the Baroque period; I’m not really a fan of architectural minimalism.) By the same token, my penchant for big, excessive, and gaudy things comes with a caveat: Each of the giant works cited above involves not only scale but talent.

Major questions to consider:

What is necessary for The Story? (The Story doesn’t necessarily mean having a plot or plots.) And what is filler?

Does the novel’s creative ambitions meet its execution?

Just because the novel is long, does that mean it has any inherent literary worth? (This becomes a more pressing issue as page count increases. After 250, 500, and 1000 pages, it better be worth my time and effort.)

How much time and effort should the reader exert? Is this effort actually sincere or does book length become a facile motivation for bragging rights? (In the film world, “I watched a Béla Tarr film, who wants to touch me?”)

What long books have you loved? Or hated? Does book length influence what you read and/or buy?

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From the courtyard, a whoosh! of something in mid-collapse -- sheets of snow coming down from the rooftop -- then the sound of the giant funnel, like an articulated windpipe, belching debris, grey dust drifting in from the stairs -- a conjurer's ghost changing shape in the spectral half-light, suffusing the air.

FIRST: some grating tossing, hardly friendly to the touch.

It would be wrong to say I didn't feel invigorated by elements of this. I prefer wrong to incorrect there. There's a moral quest to the struggle of a 900 page novel which wallows in ideograms, chess problems and tight circles of narrative linked by billowing description. There's a time honored composting underway, a molecular breakdown under the forces of history and folly. Armand's painting of such isn't truly evocative. He yearns instead for conspiracy. The author longs for readers who've developed strong backs and calloused hands from generational reading into the late nights of their lives. He desires those who snap at the references to Hrabal, at Goebbels, at the Simplicissimus. Oh and lathered in Mahler.

A younger Jon would have taken the bait with glee. This Jon trudged as across muddy fields of Moravia nursing a fever and a blinding hangover. I noted the robots and respect the reference. Oh look there's a Western Civ lesson through a chronicle of the rat population: didn't Lawrence Norfolk do that? Yes, yes he did. There's a strong Czech lineage in my wife's maternial family tree. That made it cozy but first we needed more drunken philosophy, as if Bitov's Pushkin House wasn't sufficient. Maybe a montage on airbrushing and historical revisionism? This was bricolage but of the most expansive and disordered manner. What a toolbox, displaying references to 100 years of Central Europe. Shouldn't we conclude the review with a list? Armand wants them everywhere, a nod to cher Umberto and his notions of Infinity.

Finally--To-The-PLOT!
There's a young writer in the mid 1990s when everyone in the West was rich. He's possibly an orphan and definitely a mental patient but oh so sage as our protagonists must reveal and revel within. He's hounded by ghosts of a mentor with ties to ancient texts, the occult and chess. If you were going to guess the Nazis, then you would be correct as well. If you're thinking of reading this, ask yourself whether you have already read Péter Nádas, if you haven't—then go there, consider it a gift. There’s remorse and regime change. Historical expulsion wrestled with defenestration as the chic transgression. Only Hegel knows and he’s in shadow. Maybe today Gregor will accept the dialectical inevitable? Perhaps the screenplay needs an edit?… (més)