ANIZAR

Armand invites us into a funhouse of many hands. Jorge Amado kaleidoscopes with Manuel Puig & Cabrera Infante in this intramural reductio ad absurdum of bowdlerised caesars & rat-arsed revolutionaries & all the evolved flotsam of that ancient quarrel between poetry & the purgatorial social contract handed down from on-high or perhaps from atop a hill in Alentejo. Historical materialism is this: 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 shows Louis 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 BrownHere 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