Michael Mirolla's ​The Last News Vendor

Reviewed by Aaron Schneider

(Quattro Books, 2019)

Michael Mirolla’s The Last News Vendor is an unexpected book. A short book narrated in the first person by a protagonist whose self-awareness has closed on itself in a circle of solipsistic delusion, The Last News Vendor is the kind of book that is more often written by Europeans or Latin Americans than Canadians. It is reminiscent of Ernesto Sabato’s The Tunnel, Witold Gombrowicz’s Pornografia or Elias Canetti’s Auto da Fé. It begins slightly off-kilter to the world and descends quickly into a strangeness that is simultaneously disturbing and satisfying.
 
The book follows a man’s obsession with the one-legged proprietor of the last newsstand in the unnamed city in which the novel is set. Unemployed, supported by his partner who is an exotic dancer, and alienated from both her and his children, the narrator embarks on macabre plan to take on the appearance of the newsstand owner and replace him. Without giving anything away, I can tell you that he succeeds, but not in the way that he expects or with the results he hopes for. One of the book’s strengths is the way that it plays out its own strange logic, pilling on absurdity to create a narrative that is fatalistic, predictable (if you are familiar with the genre within which Mirolla is working), but always engaging. Like the train that bears down on the protagonist at one point, you can see it coming, but it is all the more riveting because you can see it bearing steadily and irrevocably down on you.
 
The book works in large part because of the narrative voice. It is intellectual, recursive, prone to digression and self-correction, and emphatically self-enclosed. It is the voice of a mind trapped in the ravelling maze of its own thoughts, and it matches the narrative perfectly. The Last News Vendor begins:

After thirteen days of having intensely studied Sully (or Cully) and his newsstand, both through close at hand observation and by means of a pair of army surplus 8 X 40 binoculars, I am now (or was then?) able to surface with this series of descriptions, notes and reflections—not to mention the premises, assumptions and conclusions needed as a necessary prelude to any meaningful action …

It is a voice of a paranoid for whom guesses, possibilities and suppositions slip easily over into facts. And, rather than being off-putting, it is captivating. It is in no small part the strength of the narrative voice that pulls you through the novella.
 
For all The Last News Vendor’s propulsiveness (it is the sport of book that you can finish in one sitting without having intended to), there is also a mournfulness to it. The narrator is steeped in an anti-modernist longing for the past of print media. He is descended from a man who called himself “the last of the true newspapermen.” He writes his notes on a typewriter instead of a computer. And he is drawn to the newsstand and its owner because they are a last redoubt of print culture in a society increasingly defined by screens, downloads, video. It is a sentiment that many readers will share, at least in part, and it is an important (even necessary) point of identification with a narrator who is defined by the emphatic idiosyncrasy of his obsessions and the extremity of the lengths he will go to realize his desires.
 
Not all of the book works as well as the narrator and his fascination with the news vendor. I found myself a bit puzzled by his partner, who is an exotic dancer who practices witchcraft. As a character, she is certainly interesting, but she seemed to pull against the main thrust of the book. However, that is a very minor quibble with what is otherwise a well-crafted and satisfying novella.
 
As I began by saying, this is a rare book of a kind that Canadians don’t often write. It is a pleasure to read something that is this original and this well done. You should pick it up if you can. However, you may have some real difficulties getting your hands on it. It was published by Quattro Books in the fall of 2019, but the publisher does not appear to have updated their website since 2018, and there is no mention of the book to be found on the site. The book is listed on Amazon, but three months after its publication date, it has yet to be released, and you can only pre-order it. It seems to be available on some other sites, but it depends on the specific site. This is a shame, since The Last News Vendor deserves a wide readership that it may not actually receive. 

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Aaron Schneider teaches in the Department of English and Writing Studies at Western University, where he also runs the Creative Writers Speakers Series. His stories have appeared in The Danforth Review, filling station, The Puritan, Hamilton Arts and Letters, untethered, and The Chattahoochee Review.  His first book, Grass-Fed, is available from Quattro Books. Visit his website here.