The Facility

Canadian poet and author Mirolla (Berlin) mixes theology, cloning, and Beckettlike absurdist alienation in this odd novel. In the near future, disease wiped out almost all nonhuman life larger than insects. A few cloned specimens live on in a superscience terrarium, which Fausto Contadino visited as a child in 2025 and where he becomes trapped as an adult many years later. Like his namesake, Fausto is offered power over life and romance with the woman created just for him, and is preoccupied with the ideas of happiness in the moment versus the passing of time. Mirolla's fractured narrative, switching among the first- and third-person perspectives of multiple Faustos, parallels the division between mind and body, between technology and nature, and between what we can do and what we should do. (Dec.)