Fiction Review

Carmelo Militano

Berlin
by Michael Mirolla
Montreal: Leapfrog Press, 2009
229 pp, $16.50

Michael Mirolla has been around the infrastructure surrounding writing for sometime now. He has worked alternatively as a playwright, freelance book reviewer, poet, journalist, creative writing teacher and editor. He has also written two short story collections, The Formal Logic of Emotions (1991) and Hothouse Loves and other Tales (2007).

His most recent accomplishment is the taking over of the reins, with Connie Guzzo McParland, of Guernica Press, and releasing his novel, Berlin, which is an odd, unsettling and nightmarish book. It begins in a simple and direct manner in describing an attempted escape from an asylum in Montreal by Giulio Chiavetta, an ex-stationary engineer and “self-styled freelance circus mine by inclination.”

The opening sentence – indeed, the complete opening chapter – plunges us into the disturbed and fractured world of the mentally unstable. It is both a familiar and an unfamiliar territory in the sense that many a novel has been written using the mentally ill or the village idiot to speak truth to power, or contemporary situations. The ground is unfamiliar in the sense that it is rare that the wild imagining’s of the mad are recorded on a computer in the form of a novel. This would be the same as if the deluded and half-starved ramblings of Raskolnikof of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment were reassembled as a document file to form part of a story within the story of that famous novel.

Berlin is then meta-fictional: a fictional character writes about the adventures of another fictional character, Antonio Serratura. Serratura’s partial story has been left blinking on the computer screen by mad Chiavetta and then is recovered and read by Chiavetta’s doctor. We in turn read over the good doctor’s shoulder. In other words, the plot works the way Russian dolls work the difference being that this is a story within a story instead of a doll within a doll. On the eve of U.S. President Ronald Regan’s visit to West Berlin, Serratura, philosophy professor, is attending the “Wittgenstein World Symposium on the Realism/Antirealism debate in Contemporary Philosophy” in the same city. Serratura has brought his father’s wartime diary with him. He hopes to read it and by so doing finally somehow make peace with that past, come to terms with its dysfunctional impact on the Serratura family, and perhaps, even shed some light on the influence of that filial history on his present marriage.

If that is not complicated enough Serratura encounters a series of weird characters and is involved in some strange incidents in West Berlin before and after the conference. The effect on the narrative is of a very dark humor, biting irony and surreal drama. For example, on the flight to Berlin Serratura meets a Jewish restaurant supplier named Singer who sells ‘gas-ovens’, of all things, to German restaurateurs. He stays at a Pension ‘Aryana’ – note the pun on Aryan. Serratura meets an ex-Nazi who is the size of a dwarf, and muttering, high-minded old English ladies. Fritz, the owner-cum-manager, who runs the pension, engages in perverse trysts with his floor-swabbing sister. It is all very odd and nightmarish, blending or bleeding into the absurd and surreal, and one has to wonder if the narrative thread has become knotted and confused or if we are merely reading some kind of allegory, whose larger meaning are outside the immediate story.

In Berlin reality is in a constant flux just as much as Serratura’s consciousness and his apprehension of the external world is in constant flux. Mirolla’s use of distortions suggests that the objective world and appearances can never be fully understood or realized. The only legimate response to this absurd situation is irony and black humor.

Mirolla achieves the transitions between the real and surreal with ease. It is a mark of his strength as a writer that he makes it appear effortless. Furthermore the novel reads like an ideological primer on postmodern fiction. There is a methodical almost grim movement towards many of the themes we have come to associate with the postmodern condition: gender re-construction, identity, the interweaving of the past with the present to the point where they are inseparable. At times it all seems like an elaborate metaphysical joke.

Serratura is a flat character; he only acts to define reality for himself at the shocking and murderous close of the novel. It is a weird and ambiguous ending and the reader is left wondering if it the murder which takes place is constructed in Chiavetta’s mind or if, in fact, the ‘real’ Chiavetta has been transformed or has escaped from to become the fictional character known as Serratura. One is also left wondering if the ending is merely a strange dream sequence – another undigested level of reality created by the mad Chiavetta. Both the reader and Chiavetta are left hanging in more ways than one. The mad, in short, is leading the mad without a clear past or a definable future; there is only the confused present.