![]() ![]() He’s been sent on a quest to unlock the secrets of the Voynich manuscript, here described as composed “by an Unknown Author, in an Unknown Language” and which has, “over the course of its moderately long history, attracted the various attentions of occultists, amateur riddlers, pseudoscientists and crackpots of every stripe from the four corners of the globe”. ![]() To borrow one of Armand’s most frequently recurring images, Nemec is playing a game of chess with no clear idea of the size of the board or the rules. There are grand political and moral themes here, as well as more personal explorations of loneliness, loss and intellectual instability. The soul in question belongs to a man called Nemec, who wanders around a city very similar to Armand’s home city, Prague (here called Golem City) while attempting to come to terms with a world without moorings. His anti-novel The Combinations sets out to investigate – among other things – the psychological fallout from the collapse of communism and the more intimate breakdown of a lost soul. ![]() L ouis Armand’s themes are as big as his novel is long. ![]()
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