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Breakfast at Midnight
by
Louis Armand (Goodreads Author)
“An elegy in E-flat for the other Prague.”
Kafkaville. Blake is a pornographer who photographs corpses. Ten years ago, a young man becomes a fugitive when a redhead disappears on a bridge in the rain. Now, at the turn of the millennium, another redhead has turned up in the morgue, and the fugitive can’t get the dead girl’s image out of his head. For Blake, it’s all a game...more
Kafkaville. Blake is a pornographer who photographs corpses. Ten years ago, a young man becomes a fugitive when a redhead disappears on a bridge in the rain. Now, at the turn of the millennium, another redhead has turned up in the morgue, and the fugitive can’t get the dead girl’s image out of his head. For Blake, it’s all a game...more
Paperback, 164 pages
Published
2012
by Equus Press
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I took a trip to Europe this summer. Thankfully, my vacation resembled nothing like Louis Armand’s Breakfast at Midnight published by Equus Books.
Armand is many things: prolific poet, Joycean scholar and director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Culture at Charles University in Prague, where he’s lived since the early 1990s. In Breakfast at Midnight, Armand’s adopted city is transformed into Kafkaville: a nightmarish landscape of crum...more
Armand is many things: prolific poet, Joycean scholar and director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Culture at Charles University in Prague, where he’s lived since the early 1990s. In Breakfast at Midnight, Armand’s adopted city is transformed into Kafkaville: a nightmarish landscape of crum...more
The '90s Prague novel that wasn't. Louis Armand's voyage through Kafkaville--Breakfast at Midnight--takes no prisoners in staking its provocative claim to what comes after Kafka, Kundera and Topol. This is light years from the expatriate mouthwash the New York Times used to lament had failed to measure up to Left-Bank Hemmingway and company. The production values are also very high: it is a beautifully designed book printed on gorgeous paper, proof that the publisher (Equus Press, like its Pragu...more
Jan 03, 2013
Andrea
added it
"Kafkaville", a pornographic photographer, corpses,and an artscape of words.This is a slim attractively produced volume, but I fear that a likely readership of this 164 page prose poem will also be slim. Students of Kafka who expect themes of physical brutality and parent-child conflict may be less confronted by this work by a Prague university lecturer, writer and visual artist, than non-students of Kafka. If Kafka said " we need books that affect us like a disaster", then this book did that to...more
PROTAGONIST: An unnamed fugitive
SETTING: Prague
RATING: 4.0
WHY: When he was quite young, a boy became involved with a girl named Regen. Eventually, their relationship became sexual. Over the years, there developed an unhealthy obsession between them, and he may have murdered her. For the past decade he has been searching for her. He is often accompanied on his journey by a photographer named Blake who takes pictures of corpses. I often couldn't tell what was going on, as it was difficult to disti...more
SETTING: Prague
RATING: 4.0
WHY: When he was quite young, a boy became involved with a girl named Regen. Eventually, their relationship became sexual. Over the years, there developed an unhealthy obsession between them, and he may have murdered her. For the past decade he has been searching for her. He is often accompanied on his journey by a photographer named Blake who takes pictures of corpses. I often couldn't tell what was going on, as it was difficult to disti...more
There is a contemporary 'epic' quality to this novel, even though it is less than 200 pages (it took four hours to read). Strangely Homeric... the book ends in 'Troy' (or a part of Prague called Troja). The Oresteia / the beginning of the Odyssey / Oedipus. The violence, too, has an epic quality, as if everything that happens is preordained and can only happen exactly that way… the spiral into catastrophe. The language, on the other hand is minimal… each sentence like an epigraph. Some memorable...more
“For every action there’s supposed to be an equal and opposite reaction. Objects collide. Faces enlarge into proximity. Time burrows beneath the world leaving fault lines, tremors. Something inside us collapses, irrevocably. After so many years this is all there is. Night at our backs. The unwatched part of ourselves turns to nothing.”
Billed as an “acid noir,” this Coltrane-eque “elegy to the other Prague” demands our attention at knifepoint. Set in “Kafkaville” at the turn of the millennium, B...more
Billed as an “acid noir,” this Coltrane-eque “elegy to the other Prague” demands our attention at knifepoint. Set in “Kafkaville” at the turn of the millennium, B...more
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Dark, gritty, a masterpiece in the underbelly of how low a person can go and how life is neither fair or unfair. How circumstances and events never really leave us and how memories become embedded in our being. How everything is just...is.
A disturbing read, like being a voyeur into someone's dark twisted mind, that they cannot escape from.
Harsh words, harsh writing, the seedier side of living. Definitely not for the faint of heart, the righteous, the moralists, those that pretend the bleak and...more
A disturbing read, like being a voyeur into someone's dark twisted mind, that they cannot escape from.
Harsh words, harsh writing, the seedier side of living. Definitely not for the faint of heart, the righteous, the moralists, those that pretend the bleak and...more
I received this book in a goodreads first reads giveaway.
Have you ever been genuinely afraid of a book? And I don't mean that in an ~ooh, ghosts~ way, but not wanting to take a wrong turn somewhere and accidentally stumble in the grimy world in which this book takes place? If you let yourself get sucked into this world, it'll take hours to shake the uneasy feeling you get from it. A lot of times you won't know what exactly is going on, but that's ok, because the protagonist is just as lost as yo...more
Have you ever been genuinely afraid of a book? And I don't mean that in an ~ooh, ghosts~ way, but not wanting to take a wrong turn somewhere and accidentally stumble in the grimy world in which this book takes place? If you let yourself get sucked into this world, it'll take hours to shake the uneasy feeling you get from it. A lot of times you won't know what exactly is going on, but that's ok, because the protagonist is just as lost as yo...more
I got this book courtesy of 'good reads giveaway'
I found this book abit confusing at times and couldn't tell what was going on in places. But I was intrigued to find out what happens in the end.
I found this book abit confusing at times and couldn't tell what was going on in places. But I was intrigued to find out what happens in the end.
I couldn't put it down! My favorite Armand novel to date. I think it's the first "ex-pat" book I've read that doesn't sound like it was written by an ex-pat. In other words, it's got authenticity and a feeling of reality, even though it's a multi-layered work of fiction. It seems to have tapped into something unique here, the psychic vibrations of Leppin, Ungar and those other literary denizens of the dark Prague of the early 20th century. In other words, it's right up my street!
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it,
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The book was won on a giveaway on this website.
That being said, I honestly did not have high expectations for this book. However, I am in love with this book! It was fantastic.
That being said, I honestly did not have high expectations for this book. However, I am in love with this book! It was fantastic.
Film noir for the mind's eye.
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Louis Armand is a Sydney-born writer & visual artist who has lived in Prague since 1994. He has worked as an editor, publisher & curator, & as a subtitles technician at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival; currently he lectures in the Philosophy Faculty of Charles University & is an editor of VLAK magazine. He has published four novels, Breakfast at Midnight (Equus, 2012), Clair Obscur...more
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