The Formal Logic of Emotion

Andrea Geary is an agricultural reporter for The Manitoba Co-operator.

This collection of six stories is clever, but clever in a way that
leaves the reader struggling to figure out the point of each story.

Mirolla’s characters are driven by unfathomable motives in a mainly
unhappy world. They are haunted by their dreams, and seemingly little
affected by the real world. In “A Theory of Discontinuous
Existence,” Guilio is haunted by the memory of a childhood illness and
hospital stay. A friend is also hospitalized after suffering a mental
collapse, and Guilio feels obliged to pay him regular visits. Guilio’s
final thoughts are of being administered an anaesthetic before he had
his appendix removed many years earlier. In “Was Socrates the First
Absurdist” and “The Anteroom,” a father and son are bewitched by
the same famous philosopher.

The author makes no attempt to establish any understandable contact
between the characters. The self-absorption of his protagonists makes it
impossible for readers to identify with them. Mirolla, a Montreal
journalist, has published stories and poetry in Canadian literary
journals and anthologies; perhaps taking one of his stories at a time
would not overwhelm the reader as much as this collection does.