What do you think?
Rate this book
Cairo
What do a crashed satellite, a string of bizarre murders and a time-warp conspiracy have in common?
Welcome to CAIRO, where the future's just a game and you're already dead.
From the author of BREAKFAST AT MIDNIGHT, "a perfect modern noir" (Richard Marshall, 3AM)
"Frightening, hilarious, insane..."
"Cairo is downright playful... filling us in on not only the tangible space, but also its sonic properties, its perfume, truly creating in three dimensions the underbelly of the underbelly." (Benjamin Woodard, Numero Cinq)
About the author:
Louis Armand (*1972) 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. He is the author of four novels, including Breakfast at Midnight, described by critic Richard Marshall as "a perfect modern noir, presenting Kafka's Prague as a bleak, monochrome singularity of darkness, despair and edgy, dry existentialist hardboil" (3:AM Magazine). He is also the author of seven collections of poetry (most recently, Letters from Ausland, Vagabond: 2011) and a number of volumes of criticism (including Solicitations: Essays on Criticism and Culture, Litteraria: 2008). He edits VLAK Magazine (www.vlakmagazine.com).
Welcome to CAIRO, where the future's just a game and you're already dead.
From the author of BREAKFAST AT MIDNIGHT, "a perfect modern noir" (Richard Marshall, 3AM)
"Frightening, hilarious, insane..."
"Cairo is downright playful... filling us in on not only the tangible space, but also its sonic properties, its perfume, truly creating in three dimensions the underbelly of the underbelly." (Benjamin Woodard, Numero Cinq)
About the author:
Louis Armand (*1972) 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. He is the author of four novels, including Breakfast at Midnight, described by critic Richard Marshall as "a perfect modern noir, presenting Kafka's Prague as a bleak, monochrome singularity of darkness, despair and edgy, dry existentialist hardboil" (3:AM Magazine). He is also the author of seven collections of poetry (most recently, Letters from Ausland, Vagabond: 2011) and a number of volumes of criticism (including Solicitations: Essays on Criticism and Culture, Litteraria: 2008). He edits VLAK Magazine (www.vlakmagazine.com).
366 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 2014
8 people are currently reading
695 people want to read
About the author
Louis Armand
85 books126 followersLouis 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).
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
July 19, 2014
More genre-bending from Mr. Armand. A blend of existential horror and black comedy. This is NOT a book for the faint-hearted. Time seems to literally bend while reading this, like plugging coordinates into Google Earth and bending space by mapping where all the characters are at any given moment. Cairo is a kind of high-octane video game you get sucked into without a rule book and someone else, an epileptic or a psychopath, operating the controls. It reminded me a bit of Cronenberg's eXistenZ, but it's like no other book I've read. While there are elements of science fiction and Bizarro comic-book humor, this is a 'serious' novel, concerned with the breakdown in collective and individual identity as a result of mass corporate damage. The world of Cairo isn't so much a construct as a de-struct. If it's a game, the only prize is you get to play again. If you lose, you have to keep playing again anyway. No happy endings in Armand-land.
November 10, 2014
I can see why this made the short list for The Guardian's Not the Booker. Wow.
November 7, 2024
A Nungar woman negotiates her way across the central desert, avoiding the shadowy corporate/state forces trying to prevent her from delivering the artefact from the fallen satellite she was contracted to collect from Lake Eyre. In London, a series of bizarre murders perplex a fixer on the edges of the city’s underworld, while in New York a man’s therapist sends him on a seemingly simple delivery and collection job. All the while, a figure – perhaps a schizophrenic, perhaps a cyborg of some kind – negotiates their way through and under a post-apocalyptic Cairo, while a Chinese sex worker-cum-spy ‘recovers’ an ‘item’ from a man in a Prague hotel room before heading across the Adriatic and Mediterranean to deliver it to a mysterious anti-state figure also in Cairo.
Five stories, presented in sequential chapters suggesting some form of connection. Two – Alice Springs and New York – involve fallen satellites, the other three centre of artefacts of an unclear provenance and consequence. Two – New York and Cairo – contains suggestions of gaming, while our Chinese spy/sex worker seems to have been either trafficked or is plugged into some kind of Matrix like system.
Armand’s more than a little surreal (as in perhaps-dreamed) novel is in equal parts perplexing and engaging, evocative and a provocation, perhaps blurring the virtual and material worlds, suggesting a global conspiracy, or a world that extends no further than this keyboard and gaming console. All the while it is enjoyably perplexing and frustrating inconclusive where just enough threads tie up for it to seem complete, and just enough stay loose to suggest we still don’t have a clue what’s going on, and that the whole thing, or at least part it, might be about to unravel. And it is all good fun with it
Five stories, presented in sequential chapters suggesting some form of connection. Two – Alice Springs and New York – involve fallen satellites, the other three centre of artefacts of an unclear provenance and consequence. Two – New York and Cairo – contains suggestions of gaming, while our Chinese spy/sex worker seems to have been either trafficked or is plugged into some kind of Matrix like system.
Armand’s more than a little surreal (as in perhaps-dreamed) novel is in equal parts perplexing and engaging, evocative and a provocation, perhaps blurring the virtual and material worlds, suggesting a global conspiracy, or a world that extends no further than this keyboard and gaming console. All the while it is enjoyably perplexing and frustrating inconclusive where just enough threads tie up for it to seem complete, and just enough stay loose to suggest we still don’t have a clue what’s going on, and that the whole thing, or at least part it, might be about to unravel. And it is all good fun with it
February 1, 2015
“Armand’s prodigious gifts as a storyteller, wordsmith, imagineer and general fiend are copiously and carnivorously on display in this wonderful, horrifying book. CAIRO is a vivid, dizzying and ultimately exhilarating exploration of the global nightmare and our big ideas about mental illness and democracy. Raw and ruthless, yet richly detailed and human, Armand takes a circular saw to the dusty corpse of western narcissism and the dread afflictions that torment and beguile the contemporary psyche. Peopled with a staggering array of the doomed, depraved and flat-out zorched, everybody’s on the last gasp and time’s running short. It’s forceful and convincing – and fist-pumpingly hilarious. Armand is a formidable, first-class writer.”
February 16, 2016
Talk about a clockwork universe. This book leads you through a weird, gruesome maze through all possible pasts, futures, & presents only to arrive at the floor collapsing under you, right into a huge steaming vat of apotheosis. It's a rabbit hole in the very best sense of it, in that a 'hole' isn't just something that drops down forever, but a series of confusing warrens filled with dark, damp things where time & space become irrelevent. If you try to use logic to interweave all the narratives with the underlying reoccurences, you've already failed, because 'Cairo' is like a magic 3D picture; you have to fall back and let yourself go out of focus in order to appreciate this trip.
May 5, 2018
Cairo was a fast read, but the way the story was told left me feeling like I was still at the beginning of the story halfway through the book. There were some grammar issues where words such as where and were and knew and new were used incorrectly. I also felt like many of the sentences were short and choppy and reaulted in framented sentences. Armand also seemed to use pronouns too heavily and often omitted using proper nouns so I had to really had to pay attention to the whole chapter to figure out whose storyline I was reading. The storylines did not seem to ever connect despite the fact that all the characters were in similar situations. Cairo wasvsucking me in about 3/4 of the way into the book. It seemed like something was finally starting to happen. Then the book abruptly ended. I don't know how the story ends. I feel like it ended 2/3 into the story. I thought maybe it was part of abseries but there ia no indication that there will be a sequel. I feel like Cairo would have been a story best told on screen. Here is a link to my YouTube review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zF3AG...
June 21, 2014
(I received this book for free as part of Goodreads First Reads giveaways).
(This review may contain spoilers).
I thought that, although this book was really well-written, it was a bit difficult for me to get into. The different storylines were quite intriguing on their own, but by the end of the book, I still didn't know how everything fit together.
I felt that the cover and blurb were quite appealing, but I was confused by a lot of the timings and everything. There seemed to be time travel, but I was confused about whether any of it was truly real or fake.
Some of the characters did grow on me during the course of the book. I did find it quite easy to read and I did care enough about the plots to keep reading and find out what was going to happen.
It is possible that I struggled a bit with this book because it's not the type of one I would normally read. Although I did notice some errors in the writing, they were mostly minor ones (though 'where' kept being used in place of 'were'), it was readable. I also liked the cultures that were hinted at and there were a couple of things that did amuse me a bit.
If you like this type of book, I'd say it's definitely worth reading.
(This review may contain spoilers).
I thought that, although this book was really well-written, it was a bit difficult for me to get into. The different storylines were quite intriguing on their own, but by the end of the book, I still didn't know how everything fit together.
I felt that the cover and blurb were quite appealing, but I was confused by a lot of the timings and everything. There seemed to be time travel, but I was confused about whether any of it was truly real or fake.
Some of the characters did grow on me during the course of the book. I did find it quite easy to read and I did care enough about the plots to keep reading and find out what was going to happen.
It is possible that I struggled a bit with this book because it's not the type of one I would normally read. Although I did notice some errors in the writing, they were mostly minor ones (though 'where' kept being used in place of 'were'), it was readable. I also liked the cultures that were hinted at and there were a couple of things that did amuse me a bit.
If you like this type of book, I'd say it's definitely worth reading.
August 3, 2014
One of the most original and exhilarating novels I've read in a long time. A blend of genres and styles, "Cairo" reads like a narrative that is also a film that suddenly returns to narrative mode again. At time they coalesce, as in a dream. Everything in it is familiar yet strange. Oddly familiar. And horrific at times. Not for the faint-hearted. Characters are individuals going on about their daily lives (no matter how bizarre these turn out to be ...) and at the same time pieces in a larger puzzle, which may or may not be connected after all. Reading "Cairo" is like, in the words of one of the characters, "entering a space that's precariously structure and impermanent. Whose coordinates and logic are shifting and barely decipherable. In which it might easily be possible to become lost." If it sounds like the experience of reading Pynchon or watching Cronenberg (two of the familiar echoes), it is, and yet it isn't -- it's also something different, something other. And a "cracking read" too.
July 23, 2014
My favorite character was definitely Lawson: "She jammed the radio back on, loud. It was a song about Delilah, a no-bullshit woman with brown skin, fear-inspirin’ and beautiful. She stepped on the accelerator, the ute jagging over the deep sandy corrugations. There ought to be songs about Nunga women, too, she thought. Walking in the sunlight, walking in the shadows…" Yeah.
June 30, 2015
I received this book as a first reads book from Goodreads. I have been struggling to get through this book on and off for months and can't seem to find the will or the motivation to get through it. I don't like the writing style, find the story confusing and boring. It just is not holding my interest and think it is about time I put it down and move on.
February 2, 2015
I received this book for free through a Goodreads giveaway.
Cairo was an interesting, if not slightly disjointed read. Vivid detail, however the book almost felt more like a collection of interrelated short stories, as opposed to a novel.
Cairo was an interesting, if not slightly disjointed read. Vivid detail, however the book almost felt more like a collection of interrelated short stories, as opposed to a novel.
Read
March 13, 2015Rollicking read - great fun.
Elements of cyberpunk, noir, thriller, sci-fi
Elements of cyberpunk, noir, thriller, sci-fi
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews