But you didn’t need to see it, to know it was true. The Combinations – the title is an apparent allusion to The Recognitions by William Gaddis – is a tortuous journey through the world of sham things and fake identities narrated in the fanciful and psychedelic style of Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.įingers tapping secret commands on the walls – Morse transcriptions of alien traffic – the groaning through the floor – the scampering of rats above the cornices – rubble sifting down into sealed-up chimneys, dumbwaiters, coalchutes, hidden passageways – the tireless inscrutable industry of ant colonies, weevils, termites, excavating through brick, mortar, red clay, foundation stones – whole underworlds feeding on the substrate of All Visible Things.

As fake as a city made of playing cards & balsawood, scraps of newsprint, papier-mâché, celluloid & déjà vu, bits & pieces of wrecked signage glued together, with nothing behind them but empty space. As fake as all the corbels, trefoils, lancets, spandrels, voussoirs, vergeboards, chevrons, crockets, mouchettes, buttresses, clerestories, balustres, architraves, cupolas of this Potemkin village his mind seemed determined to erect at every turn. There were bridges, empty parks, railway lines, boat horns echoing in a distance calculated to sound fake. A fabric of The Combinations is the stuff that nightmares are made of… Prague, dirty old town: at night Kafkian spectres and alchemical apparitions stroll all over the place…And the dark shadow of golem presides over them all. “Kafka’s The Trial meets Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities.” 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 on 888 + xxxvii pages, Louis Armand’s The Combinations is a “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.

The combinations by louis armand