The Berlin Wall
Alum - Creative Writing at The New School
Whiskey Tit, 2024
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
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.
– Babak Lakghomi, author of South
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.