Menudo

by Louis Armand

Set in Mexico, Menudo is a radical montage of overlapping accounts of a crime. Details multiply, repeat, segue into one another, but do not "add up." These include laboratory transcripts; the diary of a drug addict in Mexico City; the testimony of a malaria patient in a sanatorium; an escapee and a catholic priest in a village near Tapachula; an archaeologist at Yaxchillan...

141 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

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

[Paddy O'callaghan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was first attracted to this book by the awesome, then I was put off by the thought that one shouldn't judge a book by its cover, and that there wasn't much in the world that could be as awesome a the cover. You see, I didn't think that I could end up being that lucky twice. THE BOOK WAS BRILLIANT - HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

[Thor Garcia · Rating 5 out of 5]

"i am on the other side of a piece of film." "the dark bodies seem like crude works of fiction." "the barely recorded details of an absence".....
Menudo is a thump to the head... unrelenting, a flying wedge, an encyclopedia of the wasteland, an uzi assault pumping desolation lead... inspiring.

[Gabriela · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imagine a three-way collision between Burroughs, Kathy Acker and Pierre Guyotat, with Malcolm Lowry and Artaud as the only eyewitness.