The Berlin Wall

by David Leo Rice

Europe, 2020. Some claim that the Berlin Wall, once a living entity, is coming back together, its scattered pieces seeking reunion on the far side of history. The European continent trembles on the edge of total war, either in reality or deep in its own feverish imagination. Part present-tense apocalyptic satire and part neo-medieval phantasmagoria, David Leo Rice's new novel presents an alternate history of the present where the Internet has become a territory unto itself and unstable factions obsessed with nationalism, liberalism, and romanticism drive one another toward a clash that could turn the very notions of refuge and culture into the ravings of a lunatic.

With The Berlin Wall, David Leo Rice has produced a text that feels totally sui generis: he has achieved the rarest of writerly feats and become his own genre. No other writer I know embodies simultaneity so cleanly or marries the aesthetics of gnosticism, decadence and pop-culture with a clarity of prose. If The New House was a bildungsroman from alternative dimensions, The Berlin Wall is an allegorical history of the present. It is as if Rice presents an archaeology of time, dusting off human chronology to reveal the multiplicative source of life in all its writhing self-contained logic beneath. He charts how forms form and the way the gross larval simplicity of fascism invades and reproduces in bodies.

- Thomas Kendall, author of The Autodidacts and How I Killed the Universal Man

404 pages, Paperback

Published May 14, 2024

Reviews

[Ben Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s 2020, and mountains have begun to rise out of the sea and the Berlin Wall, a living entity, tries to rebuild itself.

Rice, once again, has created an incredibly timely and timeless piece focusing on the darkest depths of fear of change. We follow 3 generations trying to make sense of this Age of Information, where truth is hard to decipher and the worst seems to be inevitable. Rice is truly a rare talent. His incredible imagination always seems to make more sense than reality. There is also a great cameo from Lars von trier.

[M Cody McPhail · Rating 5 out of 5]

My thoughts on The Berlin Wall by David Leo Rice:::::::

An encroaching coastline of mountains and ice decimates the surrounding border of Europe. No one is sure what's causing it. Germany is at the center of these changes. Political upheaval is everywhere. Internet personalities vie for support from the citizens. One of the more popular political hopefuls claims to be an actual inhabitant of Atlantis. The current Chancellor is trying to hold onto her position. Hell is breaking loose caused by factions led by the mass murderer Anders Breivik. He wants a return to the mission of the third reich. He wants the final final solution fulfilled.

Three main characters traverse this landscape with their pov's in alternating sections.

Gyorgy is an easily impressionable politically right leaning 19 year old looking for his place in society. The second pov is from Ute, a piece of the living wall. She roams the world-at-large looking for other disparate sections of the Berlin Wall. The wall was an actual living being. Its pieces are lost, looking for one another to be united again. Our third character is Anika, a professor and author with ties to the upper class and the art world of Berlin. She is charged with writing a book that captures the perfect example of Germany in an idyllic mode under fascist rule.

They all are navigating a world being turned inside out by a fascist surge. Anders Breivik's cult is worshipping an altar in the Black Forest. The trees are on fire. The sky is being blocked by enormous swaths of loose skin. The alien skin covers most of the land. An entire German town exists eternally in perpetual Sunday. Ute of the living wall makes love and receives messages through the exposed wires that jut out of her body. She uses these wires to intertwine with fellow living wall fragments to reconnect themselves. Gyorgy is channeling an ancient Hungarian warrior that does battle while adorning wolf skins. He's looking to destroy Breivik and his army. A war to find out which flavor of authoritarian rule will dominate. Unfortunately, Gyorgy is pregnant with Breivik's spawn of immortal Atlanteans. They are being bred to take over the world.

And there are psychic body sized eggs occupied by evil men.

This all understandably takes place in 2020.

There are books you read that float along, give you a nice tale about life and how we live it. There are other books that want to rip your mind apart, swallow you whole, and spit your chewed up carcass out. David Leo Rice uses his skill at creating whole new existences to terrify and inspire his readers. A nightmare of unending fascist existences folding in on themselves. Told in a way that can only be justifiably demonstrated in its original form. This book will envelop you. Take over your life for the duration of the reading experience. Make you question whether or not what you're reading is actually happening on the page. It is at times disgusting. At times it is pastoral. Some of the most impressive prose I've ever read exists here. It is writing that is of this time and no other before it. Years from now readers will discover this book and think it a milestone. I haven't read all of the books in existence or even a percentage of them but, I think, this is one of the most original pieces of fiction ever written. Equal parts Philip K Dick, William S Burroughs, David Cronenberg, Robert Anton Wilson. An immense work that stands alone. It is a mythical island covered in skin with roving concrete human art objects. It is men, impregnated with evil, searching to create the perfectly awful society. It is the enslavement of all those that are deemed weak and expendable. I think we can all relate.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE BERLIN WALL, at first, seems straightforward in a way that other David Leo Rice books do not. As you move through it, however, each scene makes you question every other scene, makes you question how all of them fit together. Of course, that's purposeful because this is, after all, the story of the fragments of the Berlin Wall. How would you go about putting that staggering structure? monument? thing? back together? And if you did put the physical wall back together, would it still be the Berlin Wall? Because of that impossibility, it isn't the surreal scenes that are unnerving here. Nonono. The more or less realistic scenes are the ones that confound and, yes, even terrify. What is their realism hiding (every time Aldi appears in the book I got vertigo)? How are we being placated so we don't really see what's going on? The cookies, or, as it were, the strudel looks so inviting! Just gotta reach in the oven to... Much as our views of World War II and the Cold War are so shattered, THE BERLIN WALL leaves us scrambling for the pieces that we hope to reunite and fully understand. Even when Anselm Kiefer appears in my favorite segment of the novel, he doesn't make things easier. Instead, he shows us our belief in simplicity is our downfall. "Give me back the Berlin Wall," says Leonard Cohen in the epigraph. You can't have that, but you can have David Leo Rice's magnificent THE BERLIN WALL.

[Babak · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Leo Rice has created a novel of extensive breadth and imagination. The Berlin Wall is contemporary in its rendition of the rise of fascism and paranoia while building upon the strangeness of its inventive concept. The bleak version of the present blends with the ashes of the past, phantasms and reality collide and become indistinguishable.

[Nick Padula · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I first began THE BERLIN WALL last month, I knew very little about the plot and more knew about the strange vibes that emanated from it. Based on other reviews, said vibes kind of reminded me of that underground nuclear waste facility whose entrance has the warning “This place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it! Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.” This novel definitely has that ominous feeling going for it. I expected a surreal odyssey through the dark soul of Europe and history’s habit of repeating itself in a myriad of dangerous ways. It definitely contained those elements, but there was so much more. I’m having a hard time collecting my thoughts on it since it kept me off-kilter (in a good way) throughout my time reading it.

The POV characters we see Rice’s strange mirror world of Germany through represent different aspects of a culture flailing for a handhold to grasp onto while dangling over the cliff of fascism (at least from what my limited literary intelligence could gather on first blush). I’ve seen disgruntled young men like the character of György all over the Internet who turn to hatred, violence, and self-destruction in response to a world they see as chaotic and in need of order and purification. He ends up becoming more nuanced than he first appeared, but he unnerved me throughout the story. Rice captured a frightening yet undeniable part of the Western zeitgeist through that avatar as well as those the Hungarian expat connected with. The other key characters (besides Ute) are figures of authority in the political as well as educational world. I expected some narrative terra firma from those two, but that stability didn’t last long. Each character begins in a largely believable world before things veer into more allegorical and dreamlike territory. Along the way, the reader might come across some familiar names put into a new surreal context. To say the very least, it’s a fuckin’ head-trip.

With how I’m describing this novel, it might sound painfully bleak, but there’s quite a bit of levity to be found. I definitely cracked a smile at some comical moments popping out in the dark, weird world of the story.

Since I’m writing this right off the dome after finishing the novel, I hope I’ve done THE BERLIN WALL justice with this silly little blurb of mine and haven’t misrepresented any aspect of it. If so, apologies to Mr. Rice! The tiny analytical part of my brain will hopefully evolve by the time I get to his next book!

[Jonathan Eisen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awesome novel. Read the first chapter a couple times before you read the rest. Not only does it showcase some great writing, but it calibrates your thinking to be able to engage with the rest of the book. It feels like it confronts the 21st century in a way nothing else I'd ever read had, and because I myself struggle with comprehending the 21st century in a lot of ways, I was able to accept the confusion and grasp at what I could without feeling like I was missing out. Before I read The Berlin Wall, I started another novel that similarly tried to capture the ethos of the 21st century, but that other novel, in my opinion, undermines it's own project by explaining (or attempting to explain) everything in exposition. The Berlin Wall suggests that this really can't be explained, as any attempt to do so just obfuscates it more. And this carries throughout the book, so The Berlin Wall is, in this way (and others), an uncomfortable read. It will at times feel like it's not grounded, or you may not know if we are in a dream, reality, or a computer game (or if those distinctions even matter--and then you'll stop and say 'of course they do'), and all of this is the experience itself, not simply a puzzle to hide the truth.

But there are moments in the book that are also quite poignant and moments that are very fun. In one chapter, a character is suddenly speaking this orb that conjured in my imagination a cheesy 80s budget-Ghostbusters special effect. This was all a major tonal shift from the previous chapter, but the shift didn't feel contrived. What might be frustrating in another novel is fun and intriguing in David Leo Rice's style.

[Yarrow Paisley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wrote a lengthy review of this marvelous novel on my own website. The long and the short of it: excellent work!

[123abc · Rating 2 out of 5]

this almost certainly would be higher if i could’ve asked questions throughout.. complex, fantastical, x rated - it’s unlike any book i can remember reading but frankly, a little above my literary level! (i don’t think i really understood it properly)

[Dave Fitzgerald · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Leo Rice notably remarked in an interview a few months back, that he has always endeavored to “be a genre” unto himself, and speaking as someone who’s read most of his work and written fairly extensively about it, I feel pretty comfortable coming right out and saying that The Berlin Wall is both his most expansive, and most accessible novel to date. Zooming out from the spooky small towns that populate his previous books, this latest finds Rice operating on an international scale, vacuuming up whole countries like a late-stage Katamari and folding them back in on themselves in service of his cycloramic grand design.

The Berlin Wall is ambitious and omnivorous in scope, but to nutshell, in Rice’s alternate-timeline Europe, the non-italicized Berlin Wall is a living entity whose disparate chunks (including Uta, one of several rotating narrators) are working their way across the continent in hopes of reassembly. Whether their intention is to usher Europe into a newly divided era, or return it to an old one, is somehow beside the point. They simply feel drawn toward the accretion of solidity. Meanwhile, a wayward young man named Gyorgi is burrowing deeper by the day into a burgeoning eugenicist putsch (led first by a kind of method-acting troll demagogue, Ragnar, and later by the shapeshifting, teleporting, semi-corporeal figure of Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik), in search of his own version of the comfortingly concrete. Concurrent to these, we also get Anika, a history professor descending into a kind of self-imposed Bavarian nostalgia cocoon as she attempts to rewrite German history so convincingly that she effectively alters German reality. Lars Von Trier also makes a brief, memorable appearance. This book is nuts y’all.

With the fascism creep of the past decade clearly top of mind, Rice sets out to fasten signifiers to a whole host of ominous vagaries – to give form and shape to these nascent dangers in our midst, and in so doing, better map their ongoing self-sustenance. For regardless of all the reprehensible thoughts we read passing through the minds of his wandering players, with the exception of Breivik (who, despite his being a real person – or perhaps even because of it – behaves here more as the avatar of an idea than a functional character), none of them ever feels exactly evil – only lost, or compromised – and Rice finds a powerful empathy for all of them within the nexus of larger forces they’re simply trying to react to and survive. It’s a case not so much of the characters serving the plot as the characters being the plot – each of them a cog within wheels turning predestined, but which we still desperately hope to see them find a way to break.

Rice’s nonjudgmental rendering of Gyorgi in particular, with his hardcoded longing for a traditional masculinity the world no longer values as it once did – the ways in which leaders like Ragnar and Breivik prey on reasonable insecurities felt by many men in the 21st century, only to insidiously slow-walk them toward a darker radicalization – make for some of The Berlin Wall’s most moving insights. There are passages wherein Gyorgi despairs at his physical and intellectual limitations, and his more existential lack of purpose, that feel near-universal in their human relatability, and when he joins a mob of Ragnar faithful in chanting “All hail the absolute!” it drives home exactly what such movements offer people, and what all of the book’s characters are ostensibly looking for: clarity, simplicity, certainty in a time of constant upheaval and complex change. Despite the Eurocentrism of the narrative, it’s impossible not to see in Gyorgi, and his persistent suspicion that he is operating entirely within the framework of some kind of globalized VR game, the scores of people emboldened into storming the U.S. capitol four years ago, only to be abandoned, dumbfounded, by their perceived leader as their fever broke and they were met with real world consequences on the other side; shocked that anything they’d done might actually matter.

This breakdown between physical and virtual spaces, and the stratification of our shared reality, are themes Rice has explored throughout much of his previous work (most notably in his seminal essay “Long Live the Heroic Pervert” – maybe my single favorite piece of writing to yet emerge from this now half-cooked decade), but where the heroes of Angel House and The New House make their way toward enlightenment or ascension, the cast of The Berlin Wall seems harder pressed to find any path outside its deepening rabbit holes and rising seawalls. Tonally, the book can often feel like a psychedelic come-up – all rippling roots and skin and Déjà vu – that just refuses to peak. One gets the sense of being in the midst of something that hasn’t quite happened yet, and possibly never will. It sometimes takes characters hours to cross entire countries by car, while others walk for full days only to end up right where they started, their paths in physical space outlined behind them as though they were traipsing through Jell-O mold. As our existence becomes less concrete and more permeable, Rice’s writing grows ever less constrained by conventional narrative structure. At times, the book feels like it’s editing itself right in your hands.

With both the plot, and Europe, fast folding in on themselves, Rice nimbly weaves together the threads in his tightening web of homegrown semiotics – the hard and soft illuminati, the Black Forest and the taiga, the Iron Curtain and the Living Wall – every piece encroaching inward like Birnam Wood on their own inexorable timelines until, with one deft final pull of his drawstrings, he cinches everything up tight – a surrealist cat’s cradle of past and future collapsed into a single, perpetual present. No matter how far Uta travels, one gets the sense she’ll someday return, in one form or another. No matter how beautifully winners like Anika and the Chancellor write their latest revisionist history books, papering over the past only dooms us to repeat it. “The communal forgetting that it’s happened before mingling with the communal hope that, soon enough, it’ll all be alright.”

[Liamschertzer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Since the demise of the Berlin Wall, Europe, perhaps the entire western world, is in a kind of shambles, fracturing both spiritually and physically. A woman, her body sprung with wires, is resisting, though perhaps soon resolved to her fate, one perhaps divine, though there is something sinister, like dark sorcery, as it is enveloped in the seeds of chaos and fascism. She was once part of the living wall that is reassembling in the Black Forrest. She’s on the road with an assassin on the run, who is perhaps impregnated with the fetus of a dark new master race, after murdering his rapist and his henchmen. All of DL Rice’s books are like odes to the possible within the seemingly impossible, the mutability of selves, between the living and non-living. And like all of his novels, and even more so here, his sentences sing, his passages drink like absinthe. We are definitely in weird territory, but is it horror? Perhaps only as much as the world around us is, when we are willing to awaken to it.