Berlin

by Michael Mirolla and Maiks Mirolla

"As wickedly funny and hilariously angry as vintage Harlan Ellison."--Spider Robinson, author of Callahan's Crosstime Saloon

"A delightful romp through the metaphysical muck."--Halifax Daily News

"A funny, tragic glimpse into the territory of the absurd, somewhere between Kafka and Vonnegut."--Calgary Herald

"Weird and wonderful . . . imaginative, unsettling, devilishly layered. Mirolla...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0981514812
• ISBN13: 9780981514819
• Release Date: January 2009
• Publisher: Leapfrog Press
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

So you think you know Berlin?

"So the only thing you can assume is that you are here in Berlin at this very moment - or can you? Isn't the assumption of your being in Berlin made a split second too late? Never mind that." Thus a novel that is ostensibly set in Berlin is really about everything else under the sun. As slippery as Proteus, the authorial voice, the identity of the characters, the very setting and time that you think you are inhabiting with them, and the nature of narrative itself - all are pulled out from under you. Berlin is an idea, or a set of ideas, subject to constant shifts that are stacked up like Chinese boxes, like Borges' stories within stories. Just at the moment that you believe you grasp what Mirolla is getting it, that moment is gone, often in a shocking manner, and some allusion or trick takes you elsewhere. Every stereotype, ever moral certainty, is questioned in a book that is by turns playful, teasing, and outrageous. Nothing escapes Mirolla's philosophical scrutiny. Don't worry, though - he shows you that everything you think is real is just what is happening in your mind. Take this challenging journey in spite of your self and learn to see Berlin in many different lights.

Metaphysics and madness in a schizophrenic city

In 1989, the Berlin Wall comes crashing down, returning a semblance of sanity to the formerly schizophrenic metropolis. Simultaneously, half a world away, a patient in a mental hospital on the outskirts of Montreal regains his senses and escapes, pursuing a flight that seems to have been planned before his entry into the institution. After the breakout, a hospital psychiatrist discovers a novel on the patient's computer; the doctor hopes the book will help reveal a diagnosis and cure for his patient, but we read the novel to find clues to his past exploits and his current destination. The novel-within-the-novel starts out simply enough: two years earlier, when Reagan gave his famous speech at the Brandenburg Gate, philosophy professor Anthony Serratura, whose marriage seems to be falling apart, is flying to an academic conference in Berlin. As the embedded novel progresses through its three parts, from third-person to second-person to first-person perspectives, the narrative flow--its very chronology--breaks down. The academic tourist's new circle of acquaintances in Berlin undergoes surreal adventures of exotic sex, torture, murder, and suicide that seem to unhappen as soon as they happen. "The universal sorting machinery has missed a slot"; it seems only Serratura can see the incongruities, but he's "helpless to change that structure, to alter its ongoing shape, to repair the damage." I've never read anything quite like "Berlin." There are perhaps inevitable comparisons to Borges, Calvino, Kafka, and Vonnegut, but its realist underpinnings remind me of other works: the cabaret demimonde of Christopher Isherwood's "Berlin Stories," the philosophical hijinks in Iris Murdoch's "Under the Net," the increasingly addled scholars who populate the novels of John Gardner (not to mention the meta-fictional frameworks of "October Light" and "Freddy's Book"), and the weird and irresolvable circularities of David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive." Mirolla's novel is funny and fascinating, baffling and exasperating, but in the end the fractured worlds of its central characters--both the person of Serratura and the city of Berlin--come together to make a sort of wild, incoherent sense that you might expect to find in a universe of parallel worlds. This is a book to read twice: first for its mesmerizing storytelling, then to tease out the meaning of it all.

well written but weird character study

In a Montreal psychiatric ward, former stationary engineer and wannabe circus mime patient Giulio Chiavetta abruptly seems alert after two years in a constant fog that the staff assumes is related to his belief he killed his wife and child though no proof was found that either existed. He read in today's newspaper that the Berlin Wall crumbled and informs his psychiatrist Dr. Wilhelm Ryle that he must return there. Ryle is stunned as this is the first full sentence uttered by his patient in the two years he has resided at the clinic. Chiavetta walks away from the clinic shocking Ryle further as the man was a notch above comatose until the article. Ryle looks at what his patient left behind for clues and finds a document titled Berlin on Chiavetta's computer. The full title turns out to be Berlin: A Novel in Three Parts in which Professor Antonio Serratura is in West Berlin attending a conference as President Reagan demands Gorbachev tear down the wall. What Ryle finds makes no sense as Chiavetta was mostly incoherent while here and does not match up with what is known about the missing mental patient; yet there is a weird ring of truth underneath the words as Giulio begins an adventure in a convergence of the future and the past. This is a well written but weird character study that turns transcendental philosophy upside down as Michael Mirolla pays homage to Kant and Kafka. Not easy to read, fans and Ryle are hooked trying to understand who Chiavetta is; why the Wall falling down awakened him and sent him on his odyssey; and what he needs to accomplish in the seedier parts of West Berlin. Eerie yet fascinating, readers who relish something entirely different will want to travel to the underbelly of West Berlin circa 1989 with on a magical mystery tour guided by an escape mental patient. Harriet Klausner

First Rate

This book is a treat. Fine writing in a novel that plays with reality as though it were a new toy. Mirolla's cast of characters are extremely well drawn with a bias toward the off-beat, quirky, in-and-out of the shadow type people you wouldn't normally invite for a sleep-over. All are part of the puzzle that Berlin offers in its story line. The novel was a two-reader for me as the first reading left me...well, puzzled. And like an itch you have to scratch... In short, this novel is great fun for the mind - I was hooked after the first sentence.

"There are perversions going on here." (p. 145)

It's the height of the Cold War. US President Ronald Reagan is about to speak in Berlin and demand that the Berlin Wall come down. But none of that matters. The Berlin that novelist Michael Mirolla writes about is more like the corrupt and degenerate Berlin of George Grocz from the 1920s. Many of Mirolla's characters are in fact gross caricatures of people just as George Grocz's drawings were. Seen through the eyes of Mirolla's unreliable and schizophrenic narrator/protagonist, logical (positivist?) philosopher Antonio G. Serratura, these Berliners are morphed by his delusions into dark Dada depictions of a depraved humanity filled with sexual perversions and Quixotic behaviors. Mirolla begins with a third person narrative introducing Serratura's creator (or perhaps alter ego), Giulio A. Chiavetta, an "ex-stationary engineer by trade and self-styled freelance circus mime" who has apparently gone insane and is living in a clinic in Montreal while being treated by Dr. Wilhelm "Billy" Ryle, a psychiatrist. As the story begins, Chiavetta has apparently escaped from the institution and as the authorities look for this putatively harmless nutcase, Dr. Ryle gets access to Chiavetta's computer and discovers a document written by Chiavetta entitled "Berlin: A Novel in Three Parts." Thus we have a novel within a novel. Ryle begins reading the first person singular novel, the contents of which are set in quotation marks--at least for a while they are. After a few pages the document becomes a third person narrative. This may seem complicated or abrupt or even unnecessary, but Mirolla writes so well and so engagingly that we don't care about the niceties of narrative construction. It seems that Chiavetta's protagonist, Serratura is on his way to Berlin to participate in the "Wittgenstein World Symposium on the Realism/Anti-Realism Debate in Contemporary Philosophy." So. We have the makings of a satirical novel about modern philosophy and philosophers seen from the vantage point of the mentally disturbed. Naturally this is interesting to avant-garde writers and effete intellectuals such as myself, and so I read on. It doesn't take a lot of keen discernment to see that somehow Giulio A. Chiavetta and Antonio G. Serratura are more connected than as author and author's character. All goes interestingly introspective as Serratura reveals his thoughts and meets and converses on the plane with a seller of restaurant supplies named Singer. It appears that a novel of ideas is developing. Perhaps a contrast between the airy, abstract world of philosophy and the practical world of business is being set up for some thematic development. Serratura himself seems a down to earth and unpretentious philosopher, a man with a wife and daughter back in Montreal who has obviously achieved some success as a philosopher since he has been invited to speak at the symposium. Yet, something seems a bit amiss or a bit quirky. Serratura's wife has threatened to leav