Anizar

This dark, humorous tall tale sparkles with wicked & hallucinatory power. A surreal exploration of existence & perception unfolds amidst the backdrop of an alternative version of Portuguese history. As the narrative navigates through disjointed scenes & introspective musings, every twist & turn revealing new layers of speculation & mystery, the protagonist, Albufarkas, undertaker maudit & artiste manqué, is a curious anomaly, a relic of a future that has already happened, "a refugee from the fate evolution had in store". Somewhere between James Joyce's Ulysses & Thomas Pynchon's best work, ANIZAR showsLouis Armand once again writing dangerously about the fractured psyche & corroded self. Michel DelvilleHyper-imaginative & wildly comico-critical glossolaliac streams are spurted by a mocking sceptic called Albufarkas. His alter-ego Antifarkus "knows he's mad," but does "the world"? Louis Armand's tangled enigma is full of parody, nonsensical monologue, &, as if from dreams on the edge of nightmare, carnivalesque vulgar &ultra tricky characters. This gripping seductive mystery is located in a Portuguese municipality that has no renowned author for tourists to consume. Tourists - Pare de sofrer, existe uma solução! Stop suffering, there is a solution! - read this startling work, ANIZAR. Pam BrownMost literature represents a latent fascism. The edifice of meaning is a living death. Thus there is a certain crime against the corporate mafi a & the police state that can only assume the form of a simple poetic act. And it is always your own self staring back at you, an event for which there can be no recorded image.... The pages are a repository of used time, corrosive anecdotes dredged up from a fast-decaying memory, a state of evolving disrepair, reified unmeaning - relentlessepisodic soliloquy & dialogue, a mind in disregard with itself, a mind in the process of unhinging: glimpses of mutant academia, Salazar's ghosts, Madame Blavatsky channelling the everyday: fatal ectopic pregnancy, Mars ascendant, Roma ultras beating the crap out of a mouldy, braille-eared vampyr. It's said that all the voices heardwithin the context of the story can be heard by the characters themselves. Ostensibly, a portrait of the Portuguese municipality of Beja, painted in runic cryptomorphs (two objects that are equivalent, but not obviously equivalent). It means nothing, it could mean everything - our mortal coil in crosshairs stencilled red, where death is the most common way of life - non-existence, an indeterminate being-here, where alienation is love's counterpart.... Beja: a nomadic people living between the Nile & the Red Sea. (Coincidence?) And so we are propelled from the particular to the universal, the archetypal, beforebeing flung back into that eternal pilgrimage to a home that was never there in the first place. Yes, a character is writing something, the very book we are reading, an autobiographic novel minus plot - blue ink stain on fingertips, watching the entropy escalate.... Because there is actually no body, there never was a body. A vision emerges from neanderthalhigh sierra, traces of Rimbaud gunrunning in Ethiopia, Lowry under a volcano, Guyotat ejaculating in the Algerian desert. . . . The soundtrack is unquestionably Morricone, as each scene drifts through a delirious exile: someone does not want the history to end - requiem for a destiny, prehistoric rain.... The only available suspect is time itself.Here is a novel that seeks deliverance in abortion of the self, through a vulva-like talisman - one in the eye of the needless. Einstein got it wrong: gravity is a disease. Everyone needs an alibi.Richard Makin