You are invited into a funhouse of many hands. Jorge Amado kaleidoscopes with Manuel Puig, Cabrera Infante, José Saramago & Madame Blavatsky 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.
ANIZAR. Equus Press. ISBN 978-1-7394310-3-7. Paperback, 124 pp. €10.00. Publication date: 1 April 2024. (PDF)
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 Delville
Elucidativo. Contundente – este Anizar de Louis Armand – um possível mergulho no Alentejo Profundo, anotado aqui e ali por barrascos pontuais, saudosismos d’algibeira ou compadrio. Álibis entre autarcas, gigolos e chaparros – tudo a coberto de moléstia salazarenta.—Rui Baião
Hyper-imaginative & wildly comico-critical glossolaliac streams are spurted by a mocking sceptic called Albufarkas. His alter-ego Antifarkas “knows he’s mad,” but does “the world”? His writings, he says, “shld be excessively made, so even the dimmest of dimwits catches on: understatements, my dears, are for the undertaken.” 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 Brown
A multiple & playful narrative, Anizar presents itself as a theatre scene but it cannot be characterized as theatre. Its title is the name of its location, but this name does not mean anything. The name of one of its important characters, Albufarkas, is like dead letters, in other words, like the sign of a lost anteriority or any present. These paradoxes identify writing to nothingness, but make it a vital exercise & open to many free imaginings, literary archeologies & fanciful or concrete realities, & narrative & existential orientations & disorientations. The title in Portuguese that introduces the last lines of Anizar designates an ultimate disorientation: “Medo da madrugada” / ”Fear in the morning,” & the literal end of its fiction: the man whose name is dead letters is found… dead. Anizar is at once a vital exercise & an enjoyable practice of literary deconstruction, reflexivity & irony.—Jean Bessière
In the glitchy Portuguese town of Anizar, Armand introduces the reader to an eccentric cast of characters. Armand’s poetic prose shifts swiftly between Albufarkas’ comic dialogues with his alter-ego; musings of the poet João Sobremango; witty exchanges between theatre manager Carbonara Inverso & librarian-dominatrix, Senhora Epimedia; & the mysterious murder of Caesar Salazarini. In Anizar Armand has adapted his constantly erupting, playful writing into a fast-paced, delightfully comic novella.—DJ Huppatz
Most literature represents a latent fascism. The edifice of meaning is a living death. Thus there is a certain crime against the corporate mafia & 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 — relentless episodic 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, before being 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 neanderthal high 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
The text is a liturgical object that yokes the reader to the author and is the site of one of those transforming withdrawals from one world to another one – Armand creates the moment where the gods of modernism come down and sit themselves on the grass mats that we’ve carefully unrolled for them. Armand’s is, as ever, writing without the comfort of crafted images. Not because he distrusts them but because he knows we’re long past the point where narratives needed to copy them in stone. He is channeling them by a very strange and modern ritual, bridled with his vast arcana from the last century’s shadow works. It’s as if he’s showing us that if we’re to give up writing conventional narratives, he’s showing us that that’s got to be no less than a progressive abdication. He’s working a generative grammar looking for a reader a thousand years ahead of us, or from those ancient days basking in four thousand aphorisms and epigrams, a strange sci-fi phonology and morphology through which all light passes into night.—Richard Marshall
Author photo © HCU, Lisbon, 2020
LOUIS ARMAND 