Canicule

by Louis Armand

"The legend of Wolf's father began during a plane hijacking, in the
Autumn of 1977. The botched execution appeared live on network news.
Shot in the neck and left on the tarmac to bleed to death, framed in
close-up by a cameraman's telephoto lens. Wolf's mother, an actress in a
TV drama, never recovered from the experience of seeing her husband
murdered between commercial breaks. Later she attempted suicide. Wolf
was five when it happened, but he still remembered what'd been playing
in the background on the imported Vistavision TV set (Hitparade), what his mother had been wearing (a white Yves Saint Laurent pantsuit), and what brand of rat poison (Neudorff)."

From the author of Breakfast at Midnight, Louis Armand -- "breathing unexpected life into the modern noir" (Rain Taxi) -- comes a new novel: Canicule, a savage coming-of-age story through the prism of 1970s terrorism, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Israel-Lebanon War...

The dog days of 1983. The bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut. Ronald Reagan and Yuri Andropov, dancing into the sunset. Hess, Ascher and Wolf are orphans chance has brought together in a small Baltic seaside town. Twenty years on, Hess, a down-on-his-luck screenwriter, finds himself in the Mediterranean, drinking to forget a wasted marriage. Wolf, haunted by his father's murder, is drawn into the nebulous world of international terrorism. When Ascher, a failed artist, commits suicide, all the stakes are changed. Or are they? With the Cold War, sex and punk rock throbbing in the background, Hess must confront his past, seeking to salvage dignity from defeat.

By turns cinematic, hard-boiled, sensual, Canicule continues Armand's exploration of the underside of the human condition.

226 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 1, 2013

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

[Herzog Herzog · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Somebody dies and right before your eyes they turn to celluloid." (25) / "You want to breathe, but you've forgotten how. Or somewhere along the line you determined to forget, saying over and over to yourself: You don't know where you're going, but your future's already been accessed, the authorities are expecting you" (138-9) / "D you know what divine justice is? Divine justice is Abraham on the mountain ready to stick the knife in.... This'll hurt me more than it'll hurt you, kid." (217) Half film noir, half poetry of the damned. A postcard from a dying century.

[Omar Abu Samra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very unique

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another dark masterpiece from the harbinger of "The gaping futility."