The Garden

by Louis Armand

"Cool, postmodern," in the words of Kevin Hart. Armand's first published volume of prose explores - by means of a rigorous experimentation - the relations between "psycho-geography" and "geo-psychology"; between the stability and instability of place, personality and perception. In the verbal setting of The Garden (with its echoes of Bosch, Eden, the classical "forbidden garden" or the Perfumed Garden of Arabian literature), figures mesh in a half-light of memory and desire. The text moves fluidly between the exotic and the banal, the archetypally general and the minutely specific. Sometimes compared to the work of Claude Simon and Alain Robbe-Grillet, Armand's "unpunctuated" prose is less about the construction of imagistic or verbal ambiguity, than it is a way of writing with the ambiguities that exist already in the world, by virtue of the fact that the world is something "experienced." It is for this reason that Armand's language always remains "concrete," the language "tangible" - it is not about experiences but the experience itself.

Paperback

First published April 1, 2001

About the author

Louis Armand is a writer and visual artist who has lived in Prague since 1994. He has worked as an editor and publisher, and as a subtitles technician at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, and is an editor of VLAK magazine. He is the author of eight novels, including Breakfast at Midnight in 2012, "a perfect modern noir, presenting Kafka's Prague as a bleak, monochrome singularity of darkness, despair and edgy, dry existentialist hardboil" (Richard Marshall, 3:AM), CAIRO (Equus Press, 2014; short listed for the Guardian's Not-the-Booker Prize), and THE COMBINATIONS (Equus Press, 2016). Described as "Robert Pinget does Canetti (in drag in Yugoslavia)," Armand's third novel Clair Obscur was published by Equus in 2011. His previous novel, Menudo (Antigen), was described as "unrelenting, a flying wedge, an encyclopaedia of the wasteland, an uzi assault pumping desolation lead... inspiring!" (Thor Garcia, author of The News Clown).

Reviews

[Cleo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want to do poppers with him

[John David Bull · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you to 11:11 Press for providing me with an advanced copy for review.

The garden is a postmodern manifestation operating at full speed and flows like boiling water you quickly have to catch before it spews all over the stove. There will be no periods stopping you as this is an unpunctuated piece of internal enjambment, annotating rhythmic genius. The experiences I had during this journey were both arduous and palpitating as this is a living, breathing piece of work. I constantly find myself returning and invariably glimpsing a new painting from this ever-changing and clean canvas.

[in8 · Rating 2 out of 5]

https://5cense.com/22/1013.htm

[Litteraria Pragensia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Louis Armand's "The Garden" is a single text, presented as prose, but definitely "poet's prose" (to borrow a term from the US critic Stephen Fredman used for the kind of hybrid poetry / prose work of Gertrude Stein, Robert Creeley and William Carlos Williams). What Armand presents us with here is a poetic novella produced as a single unpunctuated sentence; but a disjunctive one, where the viewpoint of the narrative switches fluidly between two principle characters: an unnamed man and a woman called simply "m". There is another subjectivity, a writing "presence" which could be Armand, could be an extension of the male character (or both?). The fluidity covers time as well, we keep looping back to the same few important scenes, glimpsed in different ways from each perspective. One thing is apparent -- somehow somebody has died, and it becomes clear that it is "m". The atmosphere of "The Garden" reminds me a lot of the work of the French fiction writer and theorist Maurice Blanchot - sparsely described interiors, characters who remain effectively faceless, an atmosphere of cold yet sometimes desperate alienation. It's an utterly European Modernism, rather than the American-influenced modes we mostly receive -- but then Armand lives in Prague. The writer-figure interests me: his own consciousness seems to flow out exhausting itself in a stream of words a literal death sentence & and what if it goes on write until you can't stand it any more then give it up if you don't want to give up go on until you can't stand it any more This pinpoints a kind of obsessive drive in the writing which becomes particularly extreme towards the end of the book when the male character is clearly trying to come to terms with (the manner of) m's protracted demise and things get a little too surreal, a little too gratuitously violent. At that point you almost lose the really exciting aspect of the poem, which is just this shifting between narrative aspects and subjectivities, a kind of stream-of-consciousnesses. [Keith Jebb, from POETRY REVIEW "Full Circle" Volume 92 No. 1 Spring 2002 Extracted from "I AM FROM LANGUAGE"]