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 Delville

Hyper-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 Brown

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