David Leo Rice splashed through town recently promoting his latest Whiskey Tit novel The Berlin Wall and delivered a very intriguing presentation. I was pleased to relieve him of a copy of the novel, which has turned out to be incredibly fertile with ideas, or maybe febrile’s a better word? To the degree that I feel like I need to sort them out! And maybe this place (Internet Heaven) is a good place for that sort of thing. To be clear, this post, as per usual from my lame brain, shall constitute a jumble of thoughts, not a coherent “review” or whatever. I thought the book was TERRIFIC, that’s my review. Buy it right away! Now for my mental mishmash:

First of all, I hope I’m correct in thinking of this novel as an “allegory”: I’m terrible with all these fucking literary terms, but I’ve read several of David’s books at this point, and it seems to me that his entire oeuvre is an allegory of Eternal Recurrence overwhelming the deluded linear intentions of all we wistful daydreamers of humanity. We’re constantly forgetting (then remembering, then forgetting, etc.) that it’s all happened before, and it’s all going to happen again, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Indeed, it’s a RELIEF. If the future is only a replay of the past, then I know exactly what’s coming next. No surprises, thank you very much. On the other hand, it’s also a TRAGEDY because everything that happens is horrific and painful, the only sane response to which is REGRET. So you have to alternate infinitely between RELIEF that it’s out of your hands and DESPAIR that there’s nothing you can do about it. (That’s my take, anyway.)

Birth is life’s first abuse. The heart of a reactionary is an abandoned child longing to return to the paradise of the womb, in which the world was Love and every need was met before it was even known. This desire to go back, impossible to fulfill, of course, is the inexhaustible fuel for fascism. A charismatic father figure shows up promising an amniotic restoration, and homey’s like SIGN ME UP. In this case, we have the character of György, a Hungarian youth studying in Germany, but losing focus as he is drawn to online rhetoric around “the Living Wall,” a doctrine that the Berlin Wall was alive and that when it was torn down, its still-living pieces dispersed into a revenant diaspora seeking to reunite into a new and better Wall in a new and better future. (And right on cue, we are soon introduced to one of those Wall fragments, Ute, who indeed wanders Europe searching for her lost wholeness. She seems to be a woman of human flesh, yet also composed of stone and grout and barbed wire. There’s a very Cronenbergian cast to this novel—a lot of creepy conceptual hybrids of “flesh”—which makes sense because the first time I saw David Leo Rice, he was promoting a book of essays on Cronenberg. What goes around comes around!)

Early in the novel, György salutes a poster in his room of Yukio Mishima’s severed head on a plate, “its lips frozen halfway between agony and exaltation” (p 27), a fantasy of masculine apotheosis and the triumph of the will. Late in the novel, György approaches that apotheosis from another angle, encountering a headless sculpture entitled ARCHAIC TORSO OF MISHIMA, which tells him, “You must change your life.” Rilke famously heard these words from a torso of Apollo because every star in the universe was watching him expectantly, which made him feel kinda special, you know; for György, the words are only a seduction, a cheap and cynical pickup line intended to entice a weak-minded incel into sacrificing his precious life essence to the appetite of an avaricious demiurge—in this case, Anders Breivik, the neo-Nazi who shot up that Norwegian summer camp back in 2011. Having escaped from prison by mystical means, this ghoul has emerged to invigorate a right-wing insurgency in Germany. György resists Breivik’s influence by summoning his own Hungarian avatar of a romanticized past, Arizstid Huszár, but this resistance is truly only a recapitulation of Breivik’s extremism. EVERYTHING is Eternal Recurrence, after all. (There’s a bunch of complicated stuff in which György is impregnated by Breivik with the perfect future race that will populate a risen Atlantis, that I’m not going to begin to tease out here and that I’m sure I never fully grokked, but I hope that’s at least some of the gist! Read the book!)

As a kind of foil to Breivik, we have the Chancellor of Germany, with whom the novel opens, delivering a speech that declares the “end” of the 20th Century while promising an eternal Golden Age to come, bog-standard, self-congratulatory, neoliberal schtick: “Germany faced its worst self and, alone among nations, triumphed” (p 19). There is one direction, and that direction is PROGRESS. Gotta love those politicians! Where Breivik looks to a romanticized past, the Chancellor looks to a romanticized future. No one lives in the actual goddamned present, ha ha! Actually… maybe it’s Ute, our very confused and roving avatar of the Living Wall? Makes sense structurally… the Wall might be the membrane between Breivik and the Chancellor, who hold each other across it in a sort of yin-yang embrace bound within a sac made of the dead skin of old Europe that seems to be wrapped around everything in this novel. (There’s that mischievous Cronenberg again!)

György’s liberal foil in the novel is Anika, a professor who has written scholarly work debunking “The Persistent Myth of the Living Wall,” and now at the behest of the Chancellor is writing a new work on “Normal Life in Southern Germany,” which is a propaganda piece justifying the Chancellor’s claim on power by reifying into an official narrative some alternative, more pastoral, mythos—what amounts to Breivik’s formula from the Establishment side, academic, institutional, acceptable. Anika, installed in the Chancellor’s cottage in the Black Forest, immediately dissipates into an inchoate depression, unable to work on the project as she herself lives out a perverse, dimly perceived version of that myth when György gravitates into her orbit to form a family unit of surrogate mother and son, soon enough joined by Ute as grandmother. They enact together a false idyll, which they understand to be fraudulent, but from which there is no escape, in which their roles are mandated and eternal: “[…] the possibility that they’ve entered an airless, lunatic loop, a smothering string of Sundays linking the world’s outset to its culmination, plays through all of their heads, freighting the question of cherry strudel or apple with a weight it can hardly bear” (p 249). The unbearable HEAVINESS of being, contra Kundera! (I’m proud of myself for picking that up, by the way, which is why I clipped it. The Rilke thing, too. I mean, this guy knows his shit! He references a million billion authors and thinkers throughout ALL his novels, half of whom I have NO IDEA. Maybe someday… I’m like the Chancellor, wrapped in the dead skin of the past, dreaming of the disembodied radiant future when I’ll have read all the books in the universe….)

What else? Well, a TON. I’ve only scratched the surface here, and I don’t have the wherewithal to dig further, but I already spent a few hours on this…. I’m sure I’ve made it seem confusing, but it’s all conveyed in clear and beautiful prose in the book. You’ll have no trouble following along where David Leo Rice leads. (Trust me, it’s not nearly as disorienting as The Obscene Bird of Night, through which I am STILL struggling, after many months… Of course, the more you struggle with a text, the more hopelessly entangled and immobilized you become. The trick is, you just have to LAY BACK AND ENJOY IT, as so many Old-World mothers have advised their nubile but reluctant daughters down through the generations of Man. It’s the story of Western Civilization in a nutshell, really. Would we even BE here otherwise? I’m thinking of you… my Obscene Bird… lurking so feral, so ferocious over there on the coffee table…)

The upshot of this post that shall not be construed as a review, is that The Berlin Wall is a humdinger of a dream novel, endlessly stimulating, and FUN—read it, damn you! If you’re someone who enjoys following literary breadcrumbs and descrying allusions to other texts, by the way, then you’ll LOVE this book. They’re everywhere—and oftentimes DOUBLED. You’ll see Joyce’s “nightmare of history” TWICE, Yeats’ “slouching” TWICE… the TWO Mishimas, obviously, head and torso, very clever…. That Kundera bit does rhyme back again later in a subtler way, but no spoilers HERE. I wasn’t even on the lookout, frankly, so who knows what I missed. Probably DOZENS of allusions I skated right past. You’ll have to read it yourself to find them, asshole! Like I said, this isn’t a review!