This is the 4th (fully corrected) edition of Louis Armand’s monumental novel, The Combinations, released to mark the 8th anniversary of the book’s original publication.

ISBN 978-1-7394310-2-0. 4th edition. Paperback. 888pp + xxxvii. Publication date: November 2016 (May 2024). Equus Press: London.

The Combinations covers more linguistic territory than Dupriez’s Dictionary of Literary Devices & Vico’s On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians COMBINED. Worthy! Gregory L. Ulmer

One of the most important novels published in English in the last twenty years. Josef Straka

One of literature’s all time great novels, a towering achievement unique unto itself, a must read for anyone who not only loves to experience the potential of what a novel can achieve at the peak of its maximalist brilliance, but it is also a must read for anyone who longs to submit to the power of the human mind operating under the pure vibration of the highest possible creative resonance, a mesmerizing literary performance unlike any other! Phillip Freedenberg

When an ambitious novelist or playwright decides to compose a modern realistic work—i.e. one imitating das Chaos der Zeit, as Hölderlin called the confusion of his own time, having no idea of what things were to become within a couple more centuries, that is, now, before our eyes—, the dusty so-called classical units become unexpectedly useful again. They provide a center to the chaos. Joyce’s Ulysses happens all in Dublin, in a single day. Beckett’s plays are models that even Boileau would have approved of. Now Louis Armand, the Australian writer who has lived in Prague for over twenty years at last count, has produced a major modern epic “novel,” having Prague instead of Dublin for locale. At about 900 pages, it is a good deal longer than Joyce’s Ulysses: if you enjoy the latter, you will find The Combinations to be almost 200 pages more fun & you will not want to miss it. Ricardo Nirenberg

The Combinations is a “great novel” — long & complex. It exemplifies remarkably the possibilities of the genre & contradicts the contemporary obsession with its decline & commodification. The Combinations unites several narrations, many gnomic & proverbial expressions, various literary frames & historical data/backgrounds.  Humor, puns & highlighted commonplaces — however slightly altered by Armand’s “écriture”: “A man’s only the sum of his whatsits, after all” — make the reader able to preserve their own identity & point of view. Comments & pauses are allowed, as shown by the “Intermission” section. That applies to future amateurs & defines the novel’s play upon continuity & discontinuity. In its construction, The Combinations compares with David Mitchell’s novels; by its balance between “totalisation” & “detotalisation” with Michel Butor’s Degrés. Armand’s questioning humor, use of commonplaces, & rewriting of many typological stories recall the reflexive attitude of Robert Coover. The cover of The Combinations should not be ignored either, in that its collage offers a precise introduction to the novel. The Combinations should actually be viewed as starting with its front cover & ending with its back cover. That just confirms the questioning power of the novel, since the cover does not show any text, except for the author’s name & the novel’s title in quite small print. Jean Bessière

The Combinations, a text to frustrate all pedants & appreciators with, to undermine those who proceed with their reading only if “faith in the book,” the book object, the book promise, is left undisturbed, those who might write (& have written), “you just can’t lose trust in a novel where so much depends on believing that the author is in control,” those who like to judge as if all judges were not by now covered in the fallout of their seeing, who cannot stand ambiguity, have been schooled against it, & will not read any further if the lines between intention & (apparent) accident, erudition & (apparently) careless error, original artistry & so-called pastiche, are blurred to the expense of all participants, & then, to compound this evidence of their imprisonment, are compelled to make these proclamations public. For such insufferable readers (including insufferable celebrants), the only errors which may be permitted for a worthy book, & which may be appreciated for their artistry, are those which are deliberate & so are not errors at all. If patience is a cloying exertion of power, a withheld insult, this book breaks that patience over its own phrenological cockhead. Ansgar Allen

The Combinations is a megalithic work of relentless examination & exciting texture. Its tendrils reach out in all directions, siphoning information from every source it can latch itself onto. Dragging this data inward & synthesizing each detail into its anatomy. Armand’s anti-novel is one of the seminal works of the contemporary avant-garde. Mike Corrao

Italo Calvino once said that “writing is essentially a combinatorial exercise” & that “reading is a way of exercising the potentialities contained in the system of signs.” In The Combinations, Armand’ssystems of signs shimmers with a blitzkrieg experimentalism, moving from micro to macro, a compounding developmental practice which lays bare, & then breaks, the expectations we have of literature. A mind-bending read, from one of the world’s foremost experimentalists. Matt Hall

A rat awakens to a mysterious object in its cage. The book unearths an anachronism in the centre of Prague, city of the golem. (To go on? Or not to go on?) The spine of the novel is a reliquary of the past, urban wastage compacted in descending chronology, slowly sinking down to the immutable. From this core bursts a magus with his sledging rap, magic wand & Judenhut; the book is a sphere in which the tree of the world has sunk its roots — rotunda of the holy rood, as painted by Hieronymus Bosch. No mere realist eye for the concrete details of the present could ever grant such insight, visionary etchings of Prague in which distortions of limescale enervate every paradox — delusions of betrayal, incarceration inside phantasms of the law. In this zone of perdition, one could say that the portent of an imminent collapse of the whole edifice of civilization has made an appointment, a tryst communicated via an immense postcard penned by a paranoiac: I pain, I weave, I sort, I threat, I traffic, I knot, I transfer, I retort, I unmake, I filter, I unfurl…. I am leaving a suicide note in the neighbourhood oubliette. Armand’s gargantuan apocalypse machine channels the spirit of necromancer John Dee & his wingman, Edward Kelly: seraphic Morse code, the whole subterranean host, where eternal fires whirl in the earth’s entrails…. The author could not have written The Combinations had he been encased in his own time. He gifts us a watchword, erases the name from his tongue & turns to dust. I sought out a hiding place & kept vigil at the entrance for eight days & nights, until a hybrid emerged: demiurge & medium — agonist & anti-self — author as factotum of language, amanuensis drunk on angelspeech & slivovice — drawing down dictation, unaware that he is copying his own demonic manuscripts, the migratory worm hoard surfacing where Escher & Piranesi collide. This doorstop documents a bingo master’s breakout: a trio of fat ladies in pagination — the number of infinity forms a triptych, a considerable dosage of eternity, where probability is always zero. Canned thunder. Atom bomb. Death sonata…. The book is only concerned with those moments when existence shatters the futility of usefulness. Don’t believe the story could just end like this — the real action is always going on elsewhere, each of the book’s numberless parts never promising to bear any reference to the rest. Imagine waking up on an autopsy table. At noontide the book casts a shadow, rumoured to mark the dead centre of Mitteleuropa: discarded typewriter keys, a cauldron of garlic soup fit to ward off a coven of vampires, a rasping black-tongued parrot, fragments strung out on angelic wires — pilgrims circle the ruins of an odyssey, bitumen & broken cobblestones heaped into an earthwork. What words have escaped the barrier of our teeth!… And Kafka’s machine is here, bristling with a million needlepoints. Bring tourniquets for a groundswell of revulsion — excavating, tunnelling, burrowing into the shades underfoot. This tunnel penetrates deep underground, stairways leading down through arcades in which holograms conjure every conceivable memory. And suddenly there it is, glowing, a storm of grey-white specks mutated between ash & pollen. Out of the darkness toward us lurches a spectral army, ghosts of chance. Memory has no origin, is always first & last combined, bolting into the star-well that never ends — a whiff of ambergris & ketamine, intercession via revenants, those who walk who should not walk. And this huge head rolls down a snowbound avenue, rolls onto the stage far left. The head opens its mouth & a swarm of tiny angels fly out. Here, if one goes to the heart of the matter, is the trigger for insurrection: someone shoots herself offstage, a surreal chiaroscuro counterfeits space…. We have reached a critical volume-to-mass ratio, atomizing at first contact with the stratosphere. A mothman descends, wings flapping as he leaps from the watchtower: clay-stricken grotesques, bouquets of blue-green algae, the odd floating skullcap — alchemic typography, page upon page of compound fracture: a crescent moon refracted in concentric wavelengths, a windborne lament. Someone is always stationed just outside the cell door — within, a spleen-rupturing howl, shattered glass — a book hacked from its vertebrae, dismembered machine dangling blood-clotted ropes — a passer-by drowning in a spill of quicksilver. Someone has jumped, a final act of self-defenestration, too impatient to wait for death- dealing sleep. We have submitted to the senseless flaw of the cyclical, an event forever waiting to be born. But the unnameable is already here, crouching with its back to the dark, the fulcrum of a point with no duration, a string of memories that defy sequence. You could close your eyes & none of this would exist, flickering in the torchlight, already coming apart — born haphazard, born sublime. Richard Makin

To open a book by Louis Armand is to be overwhelmed. His writing exists in a superlative zone, an inundation of reference, gag, dig & aperçu, as appropriate to the loftiest dreams of what avant-garde-ism can mean as it is to our hyper-stimulated, over-saturated culture. This has never been truer than in his Prague epic, The Combinations, as the ribald ghosts of history act the maggot with their progeny, memory & consequence, through the streets of Golem City & across the page. Tobias Ryan

The Combinations collapses a gloriously murky firework. Exploded views of a man, a city, a manuscript, a game, a joke – where the assorted pieces are drifting apart, getting lost, losing us – congeals into a concentrated yet digressive core. It’s a creation of scattering affordances, a dizzy spell for the ages, a circumlocutory tease, a false floor to go with all our false ceilings. But most of all it’s a cause for celebration, for delirious immersion, a chance to anticipate it all & nothing, to make like Heydrich sitting on a bomb. Gary J. Shipley

With an enormous book the readerly focus is often on the breadth of its narrative scope, which is certainly the case with The Combinations, but Armand’s focus is far more on the scope of language’s potential. The noise, heterogeneity, chaos, happenstance, & misregistration of the city is not described so much as it IS the text itself. John Trefry

888 pages of triple-infinity spool & unspool on a Rostov MK105 reel-to-reel tapemachine & only through trifocal spyglasses can you catch an Augenblick of the totality of this 1000th generation computer mindfuck that bores all-too-real phantasmagoric holes into the tortured 1000-year history of the City of a 1000 Spires in the Omphalos of a Metropolis some people sometimes call Prague or Praha or Praga. Armand serves up an iron cauldron of spicy paprika goulash & Pilsner beer & political horror & memory holes & forgetting vectors & philosophical whirlpools… language & dumplings, please! r.g. vašíček

I once used my well-read copy of the first edition of Louis Armand’s The Combinations to knock out an intruder who broke into my house—at nearly 900 pages, the book is so big & dense, all it took was one good swing. I expect to be able to take on multitudes with this new corrected edition of what is nothing short of a Great Prague Novel that goes all the way, embodying an entire cultural history while exhibiting Armand’s matchless wit, style, & intellect. Combining different modalities, voices, & rhetorical postures, The Combinations is an absurdist masterpiece & a literary triumph. I dare any contemporary author to write something of this scope that’s this good. D. Harlan Wilson

The Combinations is a vast sprawling novel, 64 chapters, 888 pages, & a convoluted plot taking place in Prague, a city beset by ghosts, history, conspiracies, & a fascinating literary history. The novel centres on the misadventures of Němec, a hapless schlemiel caught up in events beyond his control, mirroring the troubled history of Czechoslovakia, a pawn too-easily sacrificed to the whims of ideological assertiveness & Cold War spheres of influence. Němec has left the confines of a state-run mental institution & has found himself plopped in post-Communist Prague. He investigates the death of The Prof, a sort-of father figure. This leads him on a labyrinthine quest, chock-full of conspiracies, digressions, various & sundry weirdos & cranks, & socio-economic critique of a post-Soviet world still drunk on Capitalist triumphalism. Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union & the independence of its former client states, the onrush of Capitalism & Democracy have not ushered in a New Jerusalem. The former nomenklatura have transformed themselves into capitalist oligarchs. “All ideologies are false, but some are more false than others.” Thus sayeth the Bugman. The End of History? Go Fukuyama yoself! Written in a self-consciously exuberant & excessive style, The Combinations is a kind of noir fever dream. The parallels with Ulysses will become inevitable, since Louis Armand is a prolific academic creator of texts focusing on Joyce & the avant-garde in general. The novel’s mock-heroics hew closer to Gargantua & Pantagruel who mocked the holy trinity of Church, Monarchy, & Academia, Armand skewers contemporary sacred cows like Soviet Communism, Western Free-Market Capitalism, & the Literary Form. Armand exposes the two major ideologies of the last century & turns them into burlesque. Beneath the empty slogans & commodified distractions lay only savagery & power games. By turns erudite, infuriating, silly, & decadent, the novel offers the reader a feast for the imagination. When I wrote my original review, I recklessly asserted The Combinations was the greatest novel of the 21st Century. I stand by that assertion. Karl Wolff

The Combinations ranges with glee & at considerable length. Is it encrypted in code, & is that code unbreakable? Was it written by Roger Bacon, or Athanasius Kircher? (Would its contents even be interesting? Is it just a fraud by Voynich?) The thrill of the chase might be the heart of another, simpler novel – even Dan Brown can squeeze plots from cryptography – but The Combinations hasn’t got a heart, not a human one, rather something paranoid & mechanical. The mystery is never likely to be solved, not in Armand’s world – it’s more likely to crack its pursuer. Cal Revely-Calder

Louis Armand’s The Combinations is not only an impressive work of experimental prose but a much needed antidote to the timeworn familiarity of the contemporary novel. Coruscating with Armand’s expansive imagination & endless capacity for reinvention, this is a work of inimitable intellectual & stylistic prowess whose bold interventions expose with unpretentious artistry the infinite possibilities that prose writers have at their fingertips but all too rarely  dare to explore. Madelaine Culver

The plenum is still here. The vast city of Prague is a leftover of what was once a shape, an event, a history, a crowd & sequence of indiscriminate ferocity. Its premise is simply a terrifying eloquence which is always, always, a simple breach of etiquette. Everything that gets excluded takes its revenge. In Armand it’s a place of sacrifice, which was once all filled with light & is now a gloom of dust. The Golem mythos looms over everything, & the necromantic wheels its charms & braids across great sprawling derangements. Which is just to say that Armand knows what it means to take revenge on the sacrifice. The sacrifice is what modernist thinking invited us to consider, where fragmentation, the excluded, the disappeared, the formless & the end shook the earth, breaking us into ashes settling onto the ground. Who since Joyce writes this kind of bustling procession? The monster is exactly that Golem rushing to become the ends of the earth, that lost & suicidal ceremony that reading has become, like a shadow lurking in a cave or a bereaved lover seeking a destination.  When it first appeared the book already seemed outlandish. It seemed to have only a belated consequence. But when you ask a consequence of what then you can’t evade its answer: the existence of the world. Back then I wrote this: It’s the defining angst of modernist culture to retain a perpetual avant-garde in the face of a social setting that has subsumed all the revolutions of the word & bought them off. Here & now the avant-garde is “the illusion… of a socially-transformative, revolutionary potential” & twists to the idiot joy showland as “only the residual after-image.” PoMo becomes capitalism’s masterstroke, it’s authentic culture a middleclass revolt, a definition for the culture industry & its cyber-poetic black screen dominance where a glam racket guts the quantifier & life just bounces. Here’s his anxiety, or at least, the question Armand poses in the 888 pages of his unreal polis Golem City, Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones, Isaiah’s “shadow of a rock in a dry land” where he meets all the dying gods – Adonis, Attis, Osiris – caught in the idiocy of the brown fog art of capitalist culture… For Armand, art in totalitarianism is obscene, in capitalism idiotic. The issue is thus about the posthumous status of the underground avant-garde: what is it for & what can it do? Since then the book’s grown more important as its obscurity deepens & what surrounds us becomes too transparent to be liveable. The book is about the dry shape that casts a spell.  Read it & find the concealed word. Richard Marshall

Armand’s The Combinations is a holy mountain of a novel. A seemingly endless maze of twists & turns, ascents & descents, through which only the bravest may pass. We, the readers, accompany our protagonist, Němec, through the post-’89 streets of Prague; streets haunted by Nazi Reichsprotektors, Communist torturers, Zhyddish cemeteries, renaissance alchemists, & suitcases full of imperialist pounds & capitalist dollars. “Blitz the highways,” reads a Mercedes Benz poster. “All ideologies are false,” the superintendent tells us, “but some are more false than others…” Prague is a city of endless contrasts & contradictions. The grandiosity of Armand’s vision is such that nothing is missed, nothing excluded; all is laid out; combinations on combinations on combinations. Joseph Darlington

Louis Armand’s The Combinations explores Prague’s grotesque underbelly, inviting readers on a feverish journey through history & paranoia, confronting the chaos of the present. A monumental work akin to Sterne’s Tristram Shandy  & Wallace’s Infinite Jest this novel stands as a maximalist masterpiece that challenges convention & demands attention. The Combinations is a vast, erudite behemoth of a book which confirms Armand’s status as one of the most intriguing & ambitious presences in Europe’s expat avant-garde community. In many ways, Armand does for Prague what Michael Moorcock & Iain Sinclair have done for London’s cultural & political palimpsest, offering a kaleidoscopic account of the immense panorama of futility & anarchy which is the capital’s contemporary history. Michel Delville

At its heart, The Combinations is a good old-fashioned detective novel – albeit one that has more in common with Eco’s The Name of the Rose than anything by James Ellroy. Gravity’s Rainbow & Ulysses might also be useful markers, but only inasmuch as Armand’s narrative ambition & breadth of vision – not to mention his erudition – are of a similar stature to those of Pynchon & Joyce. As we follow Němec’s day-to-day peregrinations around “Golem City” (a vision of Prague as a psychogeographical chess board), we encounter a cornucopia of historical & mythological characters, from Faust & Edward Kelly, to Enoch & Hermes Trismegistus, with Reinhard Heydrich & Rudolf Slánský in walk-on roles. The ostensible grail at the end of Němec’s quest – if indeed there is an end – is the mysterious Voynich Manuscript: a work of Renaissance philology “Composed by an Unknown Author, in an Unknown Language, (which) had, over the course of its moderately long history, attracted the various attentions of occultists, amateur riddlers, pseudoscientists & crackpots of every stripe from the four corners of the globe…” This description should at least give you an idea of the novel’s trajectory, its gallows humour, its fascination with the flora & fauna of occult history & literary in-jokes. Phil Shoenfelt

The Combinations… well, that says it all really, in the title alone. The combination of various techniques, whether visual or purely word based are all deconstructed, laid out, tampered with, nipped, tucked, cut, processed, bleached, & brutalised, & eventually reformed. Give an assignment to Louis Armand & he will become not only Doctor Frankenstein, but also Igor, his dedicated assistant, & even then, that is not enough, as Armand will go one up from that. Armand will become the metal rods & electrical volts that are needed to create a monster. And what a wonderous monster Armand creates. This is not a mere book. It is a deadly weapon, both in the physical sense & metaphorical sense. It is bursting with ideas, & information, & a passion, so seething, so volatile, it cracks open the word passion & lets the yolk run down all the boring books you know that you shouldn’t have on your bookshelves, & the world is once again being liberated. The Combinations makes itself known throughout history as “THAT BOOK.” The Combinations that are inherent, hidden, stretched throughout the books inky, blotchy, aesthetically tantalising interior are steeped in an alternative & less wanky academia, that is if academia was all based upon punk-rock piss-head ambiances – with an acid inflection – delivered by font, vision, & everything else that makes a Louis Armand book what it is… creative madness. This is an artbook. But it is more than an artbook. It is a statement of intent. This is literature at its most omnipotent, that the Book Gods are now having a board meeting, trying to figure out whether they should just cash in their cheques & leave the real thinkers, like Armand, to get on with it, or to try & learn from such visionaries. This is poetical, polemical, & important. This is that book that has been smoking too much Mary Jay-Jay laced with something else, that no form of Class-A drug can induce/produce. The visuals, conjured by image manipulation & words are sweeping you up, oh boi, oh boi, it is a heady concoction. It is transcendental, tactile, textural, bold, brave, & most importantly a Louis Armand book. No one puts out work quite like this. It is in totality a paradoxical & life-changing experience, to read an Armand book. Zak Ferguson

The Combinations is a vast & sprawling literary game of words, ideas & forms. Set in post communist era Prague, it is written with an underlying tone of cynical sarcasm. It regularly mocks & derides its own content, challenging the reader to follow the labyrinthian narrative of puzzle within puzzle, to seek meaning within the hyperbole. An astonishing creation, a literary journey that I am glad to have experienced. It demands time, so much time, & attention. Jackie Law

But if the much vaunted “Prague novel” is something to be claimed for an English-language Prague author, there can be no doubt that The Combinations is definitive. In the vein of Hašek’s Good Soldier Švejk & deeply rooted in the city’s literary & politico-satirical culture, Armand’s novel fulfils Alan Levy’s predictions & makes a powerful claim upon “a Prague literary philosophy,” representing a major document of the post-Communist Prague literary renaissance, which includes writers like Jáchym Topol, Iva Pekárková, Michal Ajvaz, & the late Lukáš Tomin & Hana Androniková. The novel follows the short life journey of Němec, a young runaway orphaned by the state, adrift in Prague in the years immediately following the 1989 “Velvet Revolution.” Němec’s encounters with the city’s various “underworlds” are both unsettling & hilarious, weaving a mesh of universal history from the incidental, the coincidental & the conspiratorial on the scale of an Alan Moore novel, whose characters – “lost souls, conmen, Führers, femmes fatales, concentration camp survivors, political prisoners & men-without-qualities” – populate a landscape that appears less & less a work of a fiction & more & more a portrait of our contemporary irreal condition. Bruce Sterling

The Combinations – the title is an apparent allusion to The Recognitions by William Gaddis – is a tortuous journey through the world of sham things & fake identities narrated in the fanciful & psychedelic style of Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. It is a mystical mystery, a postmodern post-noir – echoing Angel of the West Window by Gustav Meyrink & Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco as well as a dozen other books. Louis Armand tells his tale onwards, back to front, sideways & even in a topsy-turvy way… Němec – some sort of alcoholic, schizoid Gregor Samsa & self-styled private eye – stumbles through a life of macabre memories, eerie daydreams, weird filmmaking, conspiracy theories, phobias, absurdist chess puzzles & sinister vaudevilles trying to decipher a cryptogram of existence… Vit Babenco

Reading The Combinations is like climbing a ladder in clown shoes as the rungs sink deeper into the quagmire of history step by step. A hundred false starts leading to infinite fake endings. Michael Rowland

There are grand political & moral themes here, as well as more personal explorations of loneliness, loss & intellectual instability… Art isn’t just there to distract & amuse us & to seek easy pleasure in this work is to miss the point. Armand has interesting & ambitious things to convey, whether we like it or not… There’s no doubt that Armand is aiming for something profound & challenging, & it is clear that The Combinations is the product of hard work & hard thought. It’s a book that deserves attention. Sam Jordison

Armand’s The Combinations is a bizarre baggy encyclopaedic novel that is 888 pages long. Its structure is based on a chess board (an obvious nod to Perec), & the book is very much a novel about Prague, where Armand has lived since the 1990s, but it’s written in a recognizably Australian idiom. It does have a plot involving the Voynich Manuscript & the provenance of its orphaned protagonist, but this is a maximalist book whose pleasures are to be found from page to page in its many jokes, complex sentences, & inventive textual strategies. It’s the kind of book that will cause some readers to run screaming (I mean this as a compliment?), but it’s an intense technical, conceptual, & literary achievement. As far as I can tell, it’s gone almost entirely undiscussed in Australia, which seems absolutely bonkers. More people should read & write about this novel. It’s too smart to go unread. Emmett Stinson

This “European anti-novel” is really much more than what it claims to be. It’s a vertiginous journey into the underbelly of a Central European world called “Golem City.” At once humorous & erudite, stylish & poised, it will entrance the reader with its seemingly endless digressions that never bore. For anyone desiring to delve into Prague’s rich history—not as an academic lesson, but as an aesthetic experience —The Combinations is a must-read & certainly the best book of the year. Anthony Marais