To count such evolutionary particulars greater than any whole, would be to expend all foregone conclusions. Brunelleschi by the light of the original photon. The way language creates a horizon from an infinite perspective, converging on two instants separated by a cosmos. “In the moment I’m unaware of myself, do I exist?” The point isn’t to preserve memory, but to create it. Man, oh man, thou patent anachronism! Why does he doubt himself.
And now the cinematically menacing sense that probability knows exactly where he is & when he’ll be there. Under any other conditions this moment wouldn’t’ve been possible. A faint distant memory of a quantum state. Whole galactic floes swallowed in the Void, invisible to the Naked Eye as it dangles from its life-support. The visor comes down over this floating world. Perhaps the history of a deception isn’t the same as the history of an illusion, but what then? One of these had an author, something intended it.
They listened to his thoughts, vital signs.
Do these detached fragments prove Time exists? They watched him. Gagarin lies there staring at black bits & pieces of retina floating in the light. An idea of “nothing.” First one, then the other. Nothing from nothing, but the random propulsion of an idea. Focus on the drift, the undertow, the invisible line reeling in. Slant of cosmic rain slashing the blacktop. Your move, Reader.The Orbital continues like this, night after night. 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. Kafka’s The Trial meets Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. The “European anti-novel” in all its unrepentant glory is here in The Combinations, following in the tradition of Sterne, Rabelais, Cervantes, Joyce, Perec. Shortlisted for the 2016 Not the Booker prize.
0 kommentar(er)
