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Lesser Ruins
From the author of Reinhardt's Garden and Saint Sebastian's Abyss comes a breathless new novel of delirious obsession.
Bereft after the death of his ailing wife, a retired professor has resumed his life's work—a book that will stand as a towering cathedral to Michel de Montaigne, reframing the inventor of the essay for the modern age. The challenge is the litany of intrusions that bar his way—from memories of his past to the nattering of smartphones to his son's relentless desire to make an electronic dance album.
As he sifts through the contents of his desk, his thoughts pulsing and receding in a haze of caffeine, ghosts and grievances spill out across the page. From the community college where he toiled in vain to an artists' colony in the Berkshires, from the endless pleasures of coffee to the finer points of Holocaust art, the professor's memories churn with sculptors, poets, painters, and inventors, all obsessed with escaping both mediocrity and themselves.
Laced with humor as acrid as it is absurd, Lesser Ruins is a spiraling meditation on ambition, grief, and humanity's ecstatic, agonizing search for meaning through art.
Bereft after the death of his ailing wife, a retired professor has resumed his life's work—a book that will stand as a towering cathedral to Michel de Montaigne, reframing the inventor of the essay for the modern age. The challenge is the litany of intrusions that bar his way—from memories of his past to the nattering of smartphones to his son's relentless desire to make an electronic dance album.
As he sifts through the contents of his desk, his thoughts pulsing and receding in a haze of caffeine, ghosts and grievances spill out across the page. From the community college where he toiled in vain to an artists' colony in the Berkshires, from the endless pleasures of coffee to the finer points of Holocaust art, the professor's memories churn with sculptors, poets, painters, and inventors, all obsessed with escaping both mediocrity and themselves.
Laced with humor as acrid as it is absurd, Lesser Ruins is a spiraling meditation on ambition, grief, and humanity's ecstatic, agonizing search for meaning through art.
296 pages, Paperback
First published October 8, 2024
About the author
Mark Haber
7 books100 followersMark Haber was born in Washington DC and grew up in Florida. His first collection of stories, DEATHBED CONVERSIONS (2008), was translated into Spanish in a bilingual edition as MELVILLE'S BEARD (2017) by Editorial Argonáutica. His debut novel, REINHARDT'S GARDEN, was published by Coffee House Press in October 2019 and later nominated for the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut novel. His second novel, SAINT SEBASTIAN'S ABYSS, will also be published by Coffee House Press. Mark is the operations manager and a bookseller at Brazos Bookstore in Houston, Texas.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
March 29, 2024
“Life is relentless, it stops for no one, the trauma, the hardship, they’re immaterial, life continues, with or without you. It doesn’t judge because it doesn’t care. And time too, time doesn’t ask permission”
.
“There’s nothing so sad as life, I think, nothing as glorious either, but certainly sad, mostly sad when you think of it, terribly sad if you’re paying attention”
.
Lesser Ruins is Mark Haber’s third offering in novel form and his most intimate and soul shattering, yet it’s also his most funny and endearing, the ability to dredge up such strong emotions on the spectrum of life through a select few characters is nothing short of perfection. Invoking Rudolph from Thomas Bernard’s “Concrete” the main character in LR pines over writing his life work yet no writing actually happens. Now I’ve often compared Haber’s novels to Berhard as they invoke his stylistic qualities ( three paragraphs over 275 pages in this one) there are many other literary greats that lend their work to this novel. Fosse, Enard, Kraznahorkai are ever present but Haber has a way of taking samples of each of these writers and incorporating his own strange wry wit into the fold and making it a modern master work that brings forth comedic relief to topics of grief and the holocaust with anecdotes of coffee ( most importantly an espresso machine mishap) and a son that is obsessed with house music and we get a great oral history of the genre, one that offers both touching passion as well as cackling uncertainty. It’s not secret Haber is a favorite of mine, Lesser Ruins solidifies his best work to date, I felt every emotion possible, I truly was in the shoes of our unnamed character and his desire for an escape from the distractions of life, foe the grief he was trying to navigate, to the life he was simply trying to sustain
.
Our narrator has just lost his wife, throughout the book we get vignettes of her suffering and his while watching the woman he loves slowly decaying and dying from frontal lobe dementia, a debilitating disease that changes his love into someone unrecognizable. All of this is going on while he tries to escape for small pockets of peace to create his life work of a novel sized essay on Montaigne the originator of the essay. Whether its his love for coffee, his disdain for the world and where it has gone technologically, or his son who is constantly sending him his house beats to listen to, our protagonist can’t catch a minute of silence, quiet, the absence of sound is all he longs for. His sculptor friend Kleist offers a resounding support character as her rants about the stupidity of human kind resonates so closely in todays climate, her work is based on the dead from the Holocaust, inspired by her parents who were both survivors she constantly references the stupidity of man as the reason for all devastation and its hard to argue with her. Lesser Ruins is such a multi-layered novel that you can’t stop, the long winding three page long sentences entrance and hypnotize, they breathe life into this book, I think the combination of the style and the subject compliment each other effortlessly and make this novel its truest form, an amazing yet human reflection on the life we want, the history we’ve lived and the future we can give ourselves, with the heart of a Sigrid Nunez novel, the style and comedy of a Bernhard work, and the language and personality of Jon Fosse, Mark Haber has written his magnum opus in just his third try, where he goes from here I don’t know, but I will be watching closely
.
“There’s nothing so sad as life, I think, nothing as glorious either, but certainly sad, mostly sad when you think of it, terribly sad if you’re paying attention”
.
Lesser Ruins is Mark Haber’s third offering in novel form and his most intimate and soul shattering, yet it’s also his most funny and endearing, the ability to dredge up such strong emotions on the spectrum of life through a select few characters is nothing short of perfection. Invoking Rudolph from Thomas Bernard’s “Concrete” the main character in LR pines over writing his life work yet no writing actually happens. Now I’ve often compared Haber’s novels to Berhard as they invoke his stylistic qualities ( three paragraphs over 275 pages in this one) there are many other literary greats that lend their work to this novel. Fosse, Enard, Kraznahorkai are ever present but Haber has a way of taking samples of each of these writers and incorporating his own strange wry wit into the fold and making it a modern master work that brings forth comedic relief to topics of grief and the holocaust with anecdotes of coffee ( most importantly an espresso machine mishap) and a son that is obsessed with house music and we get a great oral history of the genre, one that offers both touching passion as well as cackling uncertainty. It’s not secret Haber is a favorite of mine, Lesser Ruins solidifies his best work to date, I felt every emotion possible, I truly was in the shoes of our unnamed character and his desire for an escape from the distractions of life, foe the grief he was trying to navigate, to the life he was simply trying to sustain
.
Our narrator has just lost his wife, throughout the book we get vignettes of her suffering and his while watching the woman he loves slowly decaying and dying from frontal lobe dementia, a debilitating disease that changes his love into someone unrecognizable. All of this is going on while he tries to escape for small pockets of peace to create his life work of a novel sized essay on Montaigne the originator of the essay. Whether its his love for coffee, his disdain for the world and where it has gone technologically, or his son who is constantly sending him his house beats to listen to, our protagonist can’t catch a minute of silence, quiet, the absence of sound is all he longs for. His sculptor friend Kleist offers a resounding support character as her rants about the stupidity of human kind resonates so closely in todays climate, her work is based on the dead from the Holocaust, inspired by her parents who were both survivors she constantly references the stupidity of man as the reason for all devastation and its hard to argue with her. Lesser Ruins is such a multi-layered novel that you can’t stop, the long winding three page long sentences entrance and hypnotize, they breathe life into this book, I think the combination of the style and the subject compliment each other effortlessly and make this novel its truest form, an amazing yet human reflection on the life we want, the history we’ve lived and the future we can give ourselves, with the heart of a Sigrid Nunez novel, the style and comedy of a Bernhard work, and the language and personality of Jon Fosse, Mark Haber has written his magnum opus in just his third try, where he goes from here I don’t know, but I will be watching closely
October 28, 2024
Mark Haber has written a well-balanced story of intelligence and emotion, insight and absurdity, humour and humanity about a coffee-obsessed college professor who is grieving the loss of his wife from a terminal illness one week prior. The scope of Haber's writing is equally memorable and enjoyable for all the right reasons to love literature: emotive, intelligent, inspiring, and humorous. Lesser Ruins shows an author with a knack for writing quote-worthy passages and an indelible humanity throughout exploring art, grief, absurdity and obsession. Mark Haber has a hit on his hands.
"Art is not the cure, she said, art is merely a respite, a narrow island in an ocean of horror, paintings or poems a million or sculptures, none of them enough to hold off the torrent of stupidity growing every day [...] because one of stupidity's tricks is its ability to cloak itself, often as its opposite, and people like to dress it up, call it fascism, capitalism, communism, whatever rotten conviction they can muster a name for and which they're either staunchly for or against, in short, whatever dogma they're able to categorize and label, and all of them amount to the same thing which is stupidity, all of them mere spokes in the wheel of stupidity because stupidity isn't simply not knowing, no, stupidity is the pretense of knowing which is arguably worse, stupidity is feigning knowledge while knowing nothing, perhaps less than nothing, because a stupid person's knowledge is a negation of knowing, a willing disregard of knowing, a knowing in deficit and this affetation of knowing is the main ingredient of the most successfully stupid and naturally someone who pretends to know will never make the effort to truly know because pretending to know is so much easier than knowing and the subsequent energy it requires to actually know, whereas stupidity is so easy it practically requires nothing at all and stupidity is the opposite of truth; stupidity is hubris and audacity, it's unbridled cynicism and the enemy of good and it, meaning stupidity, plagues the ghouls of this worldwho want noting more than to rule all of us and this has never changed and never will."
"A phony artist can never become a genuine artist, however a genuine artist can always become a ta genuine artist is always at risk of becoming a phony artist, in fact a phony artist, always at risk of losing themselves, because the world tempts with its detours and diversions and moronic fanfares, the world is literally begging for the genuine artist to suc- cumb and descend and thus become a phony artist, so the artist is taken down a notch, so the world can celebrate and declare the artist is no different than the rest of them, meaning the non-artists, and has always been like the rest of them, because a creative life, an artist's life, makes no sense to the rest of the world, an artist's life makes the world uncomfortable; to an outsider an artist's life is nonsensical. Why aren't they serious about the things we're serious about, the world asks, the things they're supposed to be serious about? Why are they, the world asks, moved by the ineffable, by things we neither see nor feel, because quite frankly the rest of the world is dull and torpid meaning, she said, hardly alive, alive in the scientific sense, sure, with blood and viscera and beating hearts, but they possess souls which have been anes- thetized, she said, the rest of the world all numbers and sharp corners, the rest of the world ceaselessly organizing against the inevitabilities of death, the world obsessed with building fruitless bulwarks against the inevitabilities of death, never realizing the only thing that endures, the only thing that refutes death, is art, hence any time the world turns a genuine artist into a phony artist, through money or exposure or the surrender of the artist's beliefs, the world celebrates because another one has joined their ranks."
"Art is not the cure, she said, art is merely a respite, a narrow island in an ocean of horror, paintings or poems a million or sculptures, none of them enough to hold off the torrent of stupidity growing every day [...] because one of stupidity's tricks is its ability to cloak itself, often as its opposite, and people like to dress it up, call it fascism, capitalism, communism, whatever rotten conviction they can muster a name for and which they're either staunchly for or against, in short, whatever dogma they're able to categorize and label, and all of them amount to the same thing which is stupidity, all of them mere spokes in the wheel of stupidity because stupidity isn't simply not knowing, no, stupidity is the pretense of knowing which is arguably worse, stupidity is feigning knowledge while knowing nothing, perhaps less than nothing, because a stupid person's knowledge is a negation of knowing, a willing disregard of knowing, a knowing in deficit and this affetation of knowing is the main ingredient of the most successfully stupid and naturally someone who pretends to know will never make the effort to truly know because pretending to know is so much easier than knowing and the subsequent energy it requires to actually know, whereas stupidity is so easy it practically requires nothing at all and stupidity is the opposite of truth; stupidity is hubris and audacity, it's unbridled cynicism and the enemy of good and it, meaning stupidity, plagues the ghouls of this worldwho want noting more than to rule all of us and this has never changed and never will."
"A phony artist can never become a genuine artist, however a genuine artist can always become a ta genuine artist is always at risk of becoming a phony artist, in fact a phony artist, always at risk of losing themselves, because the world tempts with its detours and diversions and moronic fanfares, the world is literally begging for the genuine artist to suc- cumb and descend and thus become a phony artist, so the artist is taken down a notch, so the world can celebrate and declare the artist is no different than the rest of them, meaning the non-artists, and has always been like the rest of them, because a creative life, an artist's life, makes no sense to the rest of the world, an artist's life makes the world uncomfortable; to an outsider an artist's life is nonsensical. Why aren't they serious about the things we're serious about, the world asks, the things they're supposed to be serious about? Why are they, the world asks, moved by the ineffable, by things we neither see nor feel, because quite frankly the rest of the world is dull and torpid meaning, she said, hardly alive, alive in the scientific sense, sure, with blood and viscera and beating hearts, but they possess souls which have been anes- thetized, she said, the rest of the world all numbers and sharp corners, the rest of the world ceaselessly organizing against the inevitabilities of death, the world obsessed with building fruitless bulwarks against the inevitabilities of death, never realizing the only thing that endures, the only thing that refutes death, is art, hence any time the world turns a genuine artist into a phony artist, through money or exposure or the surrender of the artist's beliefs, the world celebrates because another one has joined their ranks."
October 14, 2024
With this third novel Mark Haber has proven that he is one of our best authors. The voice in this Bernhardian style novel is so compelling it’s hard to pause the narrative, so I read it in one sitting.
The protagonist has just lost his beloved wife to a terrible disease, but feels that this will give him time to finally complete his life’s work-a book long essay on Montaigne. Initially, I felt a kinship with the narrator as he bemoans the constant interruptions in his life, the chirping of his detested smartphone being the main distraction. But as the book progresses we see the biggest hindrance to time for reading, writing, and slow thinking are his own discursive thoughts, among them his obsession with coffee.
Haber claims Bernard as an influence and this novel does feature a community college humanities professor losing his grip on life as he obsesses about his now dead wife’s death and illness, goes down rabbit holes researching peripheral characters in the life of Montaigne, ponders Jewishness after the Holocaust and what art can and cannot say about the horrors of death camps, but the breadth of knowledge about art and artists, philosophy, literature, history, the observations on the human condition, the humor, and, uniquely, the finer points of house music aka underground techno music, are wholly original to Mark Haber.
I was initially worried that 234 pages of this style was too long, but the pace and cohesive flow of this wide ranging meditation is nothing short of brilliant.
Highly recommended
The protagonist has just lost his beloved wife to a terrible disease, but feels that this will give him time to finally complete his life’s work-a book long essay on Montaigne. Initially, I felt a kinship with the narrator as he bemoans the constant interruptions in his life, the chirping of his detested smartphone being the main distraction. But as the book progresses we see the biggest hindrance to time for reading, writing, and slow thinking are his own discursive thoughts, among them his obsession with coffee.
Haber claims Bernard as an influence and this novel does feature a community college humanities professor losing his grip on life as he obsesses about his now dead wife’s death and illness, goes down rabbit holes researching peripheral characters in the life of Montaigne, ponders Jewishness after the Holocaust and what art can and cannot say about the horrors of death camps, but the breadth of knowledge about art and artists, philosophy, literature, history, the observations on the human condition, the humor, and, uniquely, the finer points of house music aka underground techno music, are wholly original to Mark Haber.
I was initially worried that 234 pages of this style was too long, but the pace and cohesive flow of this wide ranging meditation is nothing short of brilliant.
Highly recommended
October 25, 2024
This book made me start to cry in my office cubicle, just as a coworker appeared to ask me about mailing address verification and auto-completion technology. He saw my wet eyes and I saw him recoil but just in his eyes, and then we talked about mailing address verification and auto-completion technology. Most likely will be among my top five reads of the year.
July 27, 2024
Mark Haber’s newest tour de force! A frenetic novel about grief, coffee, writing, and electronic dance music- but mostly, the slow unraveling of a man.
October 7, 2024
“[L]iterature, I always thought, was a wordless prayer, even though it’s made up entirely of words, I thought, still, it’s more akin to a wordless prayer, to transcendence and euphoria or, if not euphoria, then at least the pursuit of euphoria, yes, literature the earthly attempt of attaining these things and the beauty isn’t in the attainment (which is impossible) but the pursuit of the attainment, the moment which dissolves as soon as you, meaning the reader, devour the words and are touched [. . .]”
——
Every page drenched in coffee, every sentence laced with caffeine, Mark Haber’s third novel is a meandering, meditative reckoning with distraction, grief, and the blank page. Like Camus’s opening in The Stranger—“Aujourd’hui Maman est morte”—the novel begins with a seemingly indifferent statement of fact: the unnamed narrator’s wife is dead after a battle with frontotemporal dementia, and he now has the time to complete a book-length essay on Michel de Montaigne—his life’s work.
If only life were so simple. Plagued by innumerable distractions and obsessions—the tasting notes of his meticulously prepared espresso; the incessant chirp of his cellphone; his son Marcel’s repetitive voicemails praising underground electronic dance music; the unbearable pain of existence after the loss of his beloved wife—the narrator isn’t able to move past the title of his work, of which he has many.
In true Haberian fashion, the novel is ludicrously funny, but that humour is balanced with an earnestness and solemnity that reaches new heights or, more accurately, plumbs new depths. There is, for example, the narrator’s unrelenting obsession with coffee immediately juxtaposed with his friend’s transgenerational trauma as a descendent of a Holocaust survivor. In short, much of the power of the book derives from Mark’s refusal to shy away from both the absurdity and grievousness of human existence. For the caffeine fiends and java junkies, let me put it like this: If Lesser Ruins were an espresso, its flavour profile would be a blend of seemingly contradictory notes. The result? A nuanced, full-bodied experience that keeps you coming back for more.
Lastly, I’d be remiss if I neglected to mention that Lesser Ruins posits art as solace against the “yawning maw of existence”—what Kleist, the narrator’s friend, calls “building bulwarks against the inevitability of death.” To that end, I wanted to highlight just how intertextual this book is by sharing a fairly comprehensive list of the artists mentioned: Montaigne, Stravinsky, Chopin, Balzac, Kafka, Cicero, Plutarch, Aristotle, Tiberius, Rimbaud, Voltaire, Mahler, Conrad, Jung, Marx, Wittgenstein, Plath, Ibsen, Sands, Blake, Petrarch, Euripides, Byron, Shelley, Borges, Woolf, Nabokov, Stein, Walser, Arendt, Rousseau, Plato, Levi, Canetti, James, Flaubert, Hegel, Mallarmé, Foucault, Dostoyevsky, Tennyson, Spenser, Diderot, Bowles, Lispector, Hugo, Eliot, Auden, Verne, Stendhal, Dumas, Zola, Baudelaire, Roth, Pessoa, Gogol, Schulz, Schubert, Debussy, Picasso, Proust, Puccini, Virgil, Milton, Hawthorne, Pushkin, Sterne, Thackeray, Byron, Erasmus, Hegel, Zweig, Freud, Rodin, Cummings, Tacitus, Cicero, Bellow, Cather, Crane, Musil, Melville, Coleridge, Descartes, Bruckner, Rilke, Keats, Dickinson, Kierkegaard, de Maupassant, and Satie.
May we find comfort, consolation, and courage in contemplating their great works, and perhaps even creating our own.
——
Every page drenched in coffee, every sentence laced with caffeine, Mark Haber’s third novel is a meandering, meditative reckoning with distraction, grief, and the blank page. Like Camus’s opening in The Stranger—“Aujourd’hui Maman est morte”—the novel begins with a seemingly indifferent statement of fact: the unnamed narrator’s wife is dead after a battle with frontotemporal dementia, and he now has the time to complete a book-length essay on Michel de Montaigne—his life’s work.
If only life were so simple. Plagued by innumerable distractions and obsessions—the tasting notes of his meticulously prepared espresso; the incessant chirp of his cellphone; his son Marcel’s repetitive voicemails praising underground electronic dance music; the unbearable pain of existence after the loss of his beloved wife—the narrator isn’t able to move past the title of his work, of which he has many.
In true Haberian fashion, the novel is ludicrously funny, but that humour is balanced with an earnestness and solemnity that reaches new heights or, more accurately, plumbs new depths. There is, for example, the narrator’s unrelenting obsession with coffee immediately juxtaposed with his friend’s transgenerational trauma as a descendent of a Holocaust survivor. In short, much of the power of the book derives from Mark’s refusal to shy away from both the absurdity and grievousness of human existence. For the caffeine fiends and java junkies, let me put it like this: If Lesser Ruins were an espresso, its flavour profile would be a blend of seemingly contradictory notes. The result? A nuanced, full-bodied experience that keeps you coming back for more.
Lastly, I’d be remiss if I neglected to mention that Lesser Ruins posits art as solace against the “yawning maw of existence”—what Kleist, the narrator’s friend, calls “building bulwarks against the inevitability of death.” To that end, I wanted to highlight just how intertextual this book is by sharing a fairly comprehensive list of the artists mentioned: Montaigne, Stravinsky, Chopin, Balzac, Kafka, Cicero, Plutarch, Aristotle, Tiberius, Rimbaud, Voltaire, Mahler, Conrad, Jung, Marx, Wittgenstein, Plath, Ibsen, Sands, Blake, Petrarch, Euripides, Byron, Shelley, Borges, Woolf, Nabokov, Stein, Walser, Arendt, Rousseau, Plato, Levi, Canetti, James, Flaubert, Hegel, Mallarmé, Foucault, Dostoyevsky, Tennyson, Spenser, Diderot, Bowles, Lispector, Hugo, Eliot, Auden, Verne, Stendhal, Dumas, Zola, Baudelaire, Roth, Pessoa, Gogol, Schulz, Schubert, Debussy, Picasso, Proust, Puccini, Virgil, Milton, Hawthorne, Pushkin, Sterne, Thackeray, Byron, Erasmus, Hegel, Zweig, Freud, Rodin, Cummings, Tacitus, Cicero, Bellow, Cather, Crane, Musil, Melville, Coleridge, Descartes, Bruckner, Rilke, Keats, Dickinson, Kierkegaard, de Maupassant, and Satie.
May we find comfort, consolation, and courage in contemplating their great works, and perhaps even creating our own.
Shelved as 'tasted'
November 14, 2024This novel appears to be as gutsy as the amazing Saint Sebastian's Abyss, but nowhere near as successful, at least for me and from what I read. I couldn’t bear the narrative voice. Not that it was supposed to be bearable, but there’s bearable and there’s bearable, and this was the latter.
Read
October 17, 2024This is like if Jon Fosse’s Septology was full of characters from Coen Brothers movies.
The narrator is a retired/fired community college professor who’s been trying for 20 years to write a book-length essay on Montaigne, and— now that his wife is dead— he might have the time and freedom to accomplish his life’s work. One of the main themes explores how it's impossible to truly think (or maybe grieve) because of how we are constantly bombarded by (or chasing after) distraction. Full of highly readable sentences that meander for pages through digressions about literature, grief, house music, smartphones, the Holocaust, coffee, artist residencies, etc.
This book is full of joy and sadness, written with style and readability. Might end up being my favorite read of the year.
The narrator is a retired/fired community college professor who’s been trying for 20 years to write a book-length essay on Montaigne, and— now that his wife is dead— he might have the time and freedom to accomplish his life’s work. One of the main themes explores how it's impossible to truly think (or maybe grieve) because of how we are constantly bombarded by (or chasing after) distraction. Full of highly readable sentences that meander for pages through digressions about literature, grief, house music, smartphones, the Holocaust, coffee, artist residencies, etc.
This book is full of joy and sadness, written with style and readability. Might end up being my favorite read of the year.
October 14, 2024
The dude loves coffee.
October 6, 2024
Mark Haber’s formidable fictional polemic against stupidity, “Lesser Ruins,” which there’s nothing lesser about, with its page-long subordinate clauses and qualifiers which can be provocative or annoying, depending on your interest in the topic at hand (riveting for me, the parts on the Holocaust, not so much, the parts on the merits of strong black coffee), had me recalling my high school senior English class in which my favorite teacher, an M.A.-bearer from the University of Chicago, no less (mind-bending for me, to imagine what that school must have been like for her after Hyde Park), was brought to a state not unlike Haber’s agitated narrator by the abject stupidity of our class, a stupidity so pronounced as to have had me thanking my lucky stars to be done with the class at year’s end and hoping against hope that I’d never again see such utter asininity, only to be confronted by it time and again later in life, particularly when I was in uniform, where it was on display as it only can be in the military, and then yet again after my discharge, when I took a position on a newspaper in a small Midwest town, where school board meetings would devolve into harangues about male students’ “Prince Valiant” haircuts.
As off-putting as such displays have been for me in my personal life, though, they’ve been as nothing against the stupidity evident in our current national political moment, where a presidential contender has topped his first-term musing of whether disinfectants might be used against Covid, a notion roundly pooh-poohed by reputable health officials, by now acting as if Hannibal Lecter were an actual person and making some bizarre comment about a fly he was being bothered by at a campaign event.
So overwhelming for me, indeed, have been such recent displays of stupidity, so much of a distraction from this review, as to threaten to make it more of a tirade against stupidity in general than a proper review of Haber’s novel.
Not necessarily a bad thing, though, calling out stupidity in general, in a review of a novel whose very brief is conscious stupidity, especially as it’s railed against by an Austrian sculptress who comes to appreciate in the course of the novel that the real subject of her works isn’t rapture, as she’d always thought, but, in fact, stupidity.
“People like to dress it up, call it fascism, capitalism, communism, whatever rotten conviction they can muster a name for … all of them amount to the same thing which is stupidity,” she says about all political systems after her parents were tortured in a concentration camp by a Nazi so barbarous that he searched out the sounds of coughing anywhere in the camp so he could summarily dispatch the offenders on the spot.
All this she recounts over copious amounts of alcohol to the book’s narrator, a professor of philosophy and humanities who comes to lose his job after two emergency academic reviews of his performance prompted by student complaints of his behavior in class, where he regularly goes off on intellectual tangents and even breaks down into fits of uncontrollable sobbing and, perhaps most egregiously of all, with how it’s the occasion for actual physical harm, causes the explosion of an espresso machine which he has kept under his desk, an incident which goes viral via another of his banes of contemporary life, smartphones, without which, he contends, the incident wouldn’t have gained any traction and quickly been forgotten.
But perhaps even more disturbing for the narrator than the loss of his job is the death of his wife – as much an outcry of grief as a screed about stupidity, the novel – who died after first succumbing to dementia, which had her imagining seeing spaceships in the air, and had the narrator, thinking to block whatever she thinks she’s seeing outside, putting up towels and blankets in the windows, putting me in mind of the loopy brother in “Better Call Saul” with his use of aluminum to protect himself from some equally bizarre imagined threat.
And as if the situations with his job and his wife weren’t personally havoc-wreaking enough for the narrator, his agitation is added to by endless effusions from his son about electronic music and its practitioners (of a personal favorite, Helen Adwande, he says she “uses handclaps in her twelve-minute downtempo tracks like secret weapons, handclaps like machetes or guillotines, with an elastic four-on-the-floor thump that’s unmistakable, with a cadence and a rhythm that’s insatiable, and when someone with even the tiniest modicum of taste hears it they know immediately that it’s Adwande, it couldn’t be anyone but Adwande”).
A veritable wellspring of grievances, in short, Haber’s narrator, in the vein of Dostoevsky's narrator in “Notes from Underground” or, closer to our own time, Fred Exley’s “A Fan’s Notes,” which I was regularly put in mind of while reading Haber. Though just as Exley could be more churlish at times than legitimately critical of the stupidity he saw around him – a critique he mounts of Gloria Steinem I found particularly off-putting – so Haber's narrator at times can be more tetchy than truly on the mark about the people around him, something that came through especially for me in the scene where he’s sacked by his dean. Reminiscent the scene was for me, with its depiction of someone being called to accounting before academic officialdom, of a similar situation where the main character is called before the dean in Philip Roth’s novel, “Indignation,” and the scrupulously faithful movie they made of it in which the dean is played with marvelous insufferableness by Tracy Letts.
Not so insufferable, though, Haber’s dean, with what I found to be his not unreasonable complaint against the narrator not just for his classroom behavior but also for his lack of progress on his would-be magnum opus on Montaigne which he’s been working on forever and which, to further its intellectual heft, he’s stiffened with a wide range of literary references.
Balzac, Dickinson, Dylan Thomas, John Keats, Dumas, Bellow, Lawrence, they’re all employed, either by the narrator in his opus or Haber in the novel, to further buttress the narrator’s complaints about anything and everything, all of which, as I say, is either engrossing or off-putting, depending on your appetite for literary and philosophical extravagance.
Not a beach read, in short, Haber’s novel, and most decidedly only for the “happy few.”
As off-putting as such displays have been for me in my personal life, though, they’ve been as nothing against the stupidity evident in our current national political moment, where a presidential contender has topped his first-term musing of whether disinfectants might be used against Covid, a notion roundly pooh-poohed by reputable health officials, by now acting as if Hannibal Lecter were an actual person and making some bizarre comment about a fly he was being bothered by at a campaign event.
So overwhelming for me, indeed, have been such recent displays of stupidity, so much of a distraction from this review, as to threaten to make it more of a tirade against stupidity in general than a proper review of Haber’s novel.
Not necessarily a bad thing, though, calling out stupidity in general, in a review of a novel whose very brief is conscious stupidity, especially as it’s railed against by an Austrian sculptress who comes to appreciate in the course of the novel that the real subject of her works isn’t rapture, as she’d always thought, but, in fact, stupidity.
“People like to dress it up, call it fascism, capitalism, communism, whatever rotten conviction they can muster a name for … all of them amount to the same thing which is stupidity,” she says about all political systems after her parents were tortured in a concentration camp by a Nazi so barbarous that he searched out the sounds of coughing anywhere in the camp so he could summarily dispatch the offenders on the spot.
All this she recounts over copious amounts of alcohol to the book’s narrator, a professor of philosophy and humanities who comes to lose his job after two emergency academic reviews of his performance prompted by student complaints of his behavior in class, where he regularly goes off on intellectual tangents and even breaks down into fits of uncontrollable sobbing and, perhaps most egregiously of all, with how it’s the occasion for actual physical harm, causes the explosion of an espresso machine which he has kept under his desk, an incident which goes viral via another of his banes of contemporary life, smartphones, without which, he contends, the incident wouldn’t have gained any traction and quickly been forgotten.
But perhaps even more disturbing for the narrator than the loss of his job is the death of his wife – as much an outcry of grief as a screed about stupidity, the novel – who died after first succumbing to dementia, which had her imagining seeing spaceships in the air, and had the narrator, thinking to block whatever she thinks she’s seeing outside, putting up towels and blankets in the windows, putting me in mind of the loopy brother in “Better Call Saul” with his use of aluminum to protect himself from some equally bizarre imagined threat.
And as if the situations with his job and his wife weren’t personally havoc-wreaking enough for the narrator, his agitation is added to by endless effusions from his son about electronic music and its practitioners (of a personal favorite, Helen Adwande, he says she “uses handclaps in her twelve-minute downtempo tracks like secret weapons, handclaps like machetes or guillotines, with an elastic four-on-the-floor thump that’s unmistakable, with a cadence and a rhythm that’s insatiable, and when someone with even the tiniest modicum of taste hears it they know immediately that it’s Adwande, it couldn’t be anyone but Adwande”).
A veritable wellspring of grievances, in short, Haber’s narrator, in the vein of Dostoevsky's narrator in “Notes from Underground” or, closer to our own time, Fred Exley’s “A Fan’s Notes,” which I was regularly put in mind of while reading Haber. Though just as Exley could be more churlish at times than legitimately critical of the stupidity he saw around him – a critique he mounts of Gloria Steinem I found particularly off-putting – so Haber's narrator at times can be more tetchy than truly on the mark about the people around him, something that came through especially for me in the scene where he’s sacked by his dean. Reminiscent the scene was for me, with its depiction of someone being called to accounting before academic officialdom, of a similar situation where the main character is called before the dean in Philip Roth’s novel, “Indignation,” and the scrupulously faithful movie they made of it in which the dean is played with marvelous insufferableness by Tracy Letts.
Not so insufferable, though, Haber’s dean, with what I found to be his not unreasonable complaint against the narrator not just for his classroom behavior but also for his lack of progress on his would-be magnum opus on Montaigne which he’s been working on forever and which, to further its intellectual heft, he’s stiffened with a wide range of literary references.
Balzac, Dickinson, Dylan Thomas, John Keats, Dumas, Bellow, Lawrence, they’re all employed, either by the narrator in his opus or Haber in the novel, to further buttress the narrator’s complaints about anything and everything, all of which, as I say, is either engrossing or off-putting, depending on your appetite for literary and philosophical extravagance.
Not a beach read, in short, Haber’s novel, and most decidedly only for the “happy few.”
November 7, 2024
With all its digressions, its various threads constantly chewing over each other, fading and rising in volume and prominence, but always with the same propulsive, caffeine-addled rhythm, the writing here felt beautifully, chaotically orchestral. I can’t remember the strategic use of italics ever being so funny. This is the most “international” feeling a great novel by an American has felt in some time, it’s dense, referential, brazenly influenced, and voice forward.
It’s ultimately, I think, about the indispensable value of illusions, be they delusions of grandeur, dreams of success or revenge, art, lives or a life not lived, or madness. How important our illusions are to the basic functioning of the absolute mundane horror of daily life. What are the things that tear at these veils? Also worth mentioning that this might be the first great Third Wave coffee novel. I loved it and was jealous of its brilliance.
It’s ultimately, I think, about the indispensable value of illusions, be they delusions of grandeur, dreams of success or revenge, art, lives or a life not lived, or madness. How important our illusions are to the basic functioning of the absolute mundane horror of daily life. What are the things that tear at these veils? Also worth mentioning that this might be the first great Third Wave coffee novel. I loved it and was jealous of its brilliance.
October 5, 2024
Lesser Ruins is a brilliantly conceived deep dive into the trauma of grief. Haber uses his repetitive writing style to really hammer home the true depths of losing a loved one while still maintaining some savage black humor targeted at technology and obsession. The act of trying to create art and the many false starts and failures that come with the process hit very close to home. I can’t recommend this book highly enough.
October 14, 2024
Another brilliant, funny book from Mark Haber- but now with a bit more heart than humor. The plot is simple- our unnamed author has lost his wife recently, and finds himself unable to focus on his Montaigne book. He ruminates, digresses, reflects on some pretty traumatic intellectual experiences, and talks to his son, a young man obsessed with techno, on the phone.
It’s a book about grief and distraction, and how the latter blocks us from processing the former. Highly highly recommend.
It’s a book about grief and distraction, and how the latter blocks us from processing the former. Highly highly recommend.
November 6, 2024
Kahveleri hazırlayın, tercihan espresso, fonda Four Tet ve Lindstrøm
November 13, 2024
Profound and funny and also somewhat impenetrable. Pretty much pinpoints humanity for all its awfulness.
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