When the Mask Slips

This latest installment in Ciabattari’s “Rizzoli” series (in 2020, Bordighera Press re-released two earlier “Rizzoli” novels, Dreams of an Imaginary New Yorker Named Rizzoli and The Literal Truth) follows Rizzoli, a modern, muddled man, through one mind-bending contretemps after another: he wakes to find his body filled with empty cavities, he watches himself disappear, his dictionary explodes with “shattered meanings,” his normal shadow is abducted by a predator shadow. Nothing makes sense; the mask of reality has slipped. Indeed, there is no reality, only the reality of dreams. But every dream has meaning, as Freud said. In brief (sometimes, very brief), unconnected vignettes, Ciabattari takes the reader through a dreamscape of absurdity reminiscent of the work of Italo Calvino and Donald Barthelme. In “Life Is a Maze,” Rizzoli dreams he is a beetle, a fitting homage to Kafka’s Gregor Samsa.