undercut with the bitter irony of a History that does nothing but repeat, like an orphaned Oedipus Complex on Zoloft. 'A homage to 70s New German Cinema, Baader-Meinhof, and the Man Without Qualities. It's labour is invisible and turns up as a kind of lucky break, something found, an unplanned event, serendipity conflated with existential instability that winds down despite itself (or up) into the equivalence of a huge ash tree holding together earth, heaven and hell.' (Richard Marshall, 3:AM Magazine) It is a novel that proposes a subtle expectation of nothing too much, perhaps a distraction. It's almost too easy to read, and what's hard, unfathomable and devastating is kept away from us. But Armand is slick and gives us characters whose intense self-betrayals work like sentinels stationed in advance of an outpost, or perhaps after the outpost has been abandoned. ''Canicule' is the hot period between early July and early September a period of inactivity where everything happens in the stillness of a long wait. Or are they? With the Cold War, sex and punk rock throbbing in the background, Hess must confront his past, seeking to salvage dignity from defeat. When Ascher, a failed artist, commits suicide, all the stakes are changed.

Wolf, haunted by his father's murder, is drawn into the nebulous world of international terrorism. Hess, a down-on-his-luck screenwriter, finds himself in the Mediterranean, drinking to forget a wasted marriage. Twenty years on, the long hot summer of the Israel-Lebanon War. Hess, Ascher and Wolf are orphans chance has brought together in a small Baltic seaside town. Ronald Reagan and Yuri Andropov, dancing into the sunset. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title.The dog days of 1983. 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 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 (9780957121362) by Armand, Louis and a great selection of similar New, Used and Collectible Books available now at great prices.

The combinations by louis armand