Louis Armand's Blog - Posts Tagged "blake"
Holiday in Kafkaville
Review of Breakfast at Midnight (London: Equus, 2012), “Holiday in Kafkaville,” by Jim Ruland, originally published in the San Diego City Beat, Wednesday, August 1st, 2012. http://www.sdcitybeat.com/sandiego/ar...
Breakfast at Midnight
In Breakfast at Midnight, Armand’s adopted city is transformed into Kafkaville: a nightmarish landscape of crumbling buildings and relentless rain.
“Labyrinths of drunken shipping containers stacked up into canyons. Rivers of slurried rainwater. Backwash. Ziggurats of scrapped steel. The drizzle once again peters out. A flair of gray light briefly in the east. At our backs. Unheeded epiphany.”
It’s as if Armand has dropped Ulysses’ Stephen Daedalus into a neo-noir novel, but James Joyce never wrote anything this dark. Haunted by the disappearance of a former lover, the photograph of a dead girl resurrects the ghosts of a gruesome past. Aided by his friend Blake, an underground artist who takes photos of corpses, the narrator attempts to connect the crimes. But every time Blake roars into the novel on his black Enfield motorcycle, more mayhem follows and the narrator sees himself “becoming part of the evidence for a crime that hasn’t taken place yet.”
The fragmented sentences and staccato prose hurry the reader from one grim scene to the next. Armand isn’t trying to shock us into submission. With gorgeous prose and a nuanced narrative, he peels back the layers until there’s nothing left but a city denuded of fake Old World charm and inhabited by souls debased beyond recognition, the very pulp of humanity. Armand has done to Prague what Genet achieves in Our Lady of the Flowers. Breakfast at Midnight is the most savage book I’ve read in years.
Jim Ruland blogs at vermin.blogs.com and you can find him on Twitter @JimVermin.
Breakfast at Midnight
In Breakfast at Midnight, Armand’s adopted city is transformed into Kafkaville: a nightmarish landscape of crumbling buildings and relentless rain.
“Labyrinths of drunken shipping containers stacked up into canyons. Rivers of slurried rainwater. Backwash. Ziggurats of scrapped steel. The drizzle once again peters out. A flair of gray light briefly in the east. At our backs. Unheeded epiphany.”
It’s as if Armand has dropped Ulysses’ Stephen Daedalus into a neo-noir novel, but James Joyce never wrote anything this dark. Haunted by the disappearance of a former lover, the photograph of a dead girl resurrects the ghosts of a gruesome past. Aided by his friend Blake, an underground artist who takes photos of corpses, the narrator attempts to connect the crimes. But every time Blake roars into the novel on his black Enfield motorcycle, more mayhem follows and the narrator sees himself “becoming part of the evidence for a crime that hasn’t taken place yet.”
The fragmented sentences and staccato prose hurry the reader from one grim scene to the next. Armand isn’t trying to shock us into submission. With gorgeous prose and a nuanced narrative, he peels back the layers until there’s nothing left but a city denuded of fake Old World charm and inhabited by souls debased beyond recognition, the very pulp of humanity. Armand has done to Prague what Genet achieves in Our Lady of the Flowers. Breakfast at Midnight is the most savage book I’ve read in years.
Jim Ruland blogs at vermin.blogs.com and you can find him on Twitter @JimVermin.
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