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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
90 people are currently reading
9538 people want to read
About the author
Mark Haber
10 books143 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 - 30 of 118 reviews
February 27, 2025
Shortlisted for the 2024 Republic of Consciousness Prize, United States and Canada
... she later admitted having trouble getting through it, actually taken aback, she said, by the tone which felt both condescending and misanthropic and the spate of digressions littering the work which suggested a deep longing for solitude, in short, my rather strong feelings about the human race because it was obvious, she said, I had a deep love for humanity which was at odds with the deep loathing I also had for humanity. One can be both, I explained, myself and Montaigne for example, Itold her, cursed by the need to reconcile a love of humanity with a dread of hu-manity, both of us embracing our species as much as holding them in contempt because, I said, look around, and my wonderful wife, now dead, found it curious that I'd acquired my master's degree on the strength of Montaigne and the Lugubrious Cherubs, which, though respecting the effort involved, felt more than a little antagonistic, as well as uneven, poorly researched, and a trifle deranged,...
Lesser Ruins is Mark Haber's 3rd novel after the brilliant Reinhardt's Garden and Saint Sebastian's Abyss. When the epigraphs for a novel are from Daša Drndić, Leonard Tsypkin and Kafka the reader suspects they are in good hands. When they see the author’s name, they know they are.
All of which set my expectations bar very high, and I should say upfront that my 4 star rating is relative to those expectations, but this is still one of the finest novels I've read in 2024, and I look forward to 'Ada', a novella promised in 2026.
The novel, told in Haber's trademark style of 'Thomas Bernhard if he'd grown up watching the Coen Brothers' opens (this only part of a longer sentence):
Anyway, I think, she’s dead, and though I loved her, I now have both the time and freedom to write my essay on Montaigne…
Our narrator is a professor who has left the community college at which he works. Retired or was fired, there are different versions, he tells us throughout the novel, although when one reads about his idiosyncratic teaching style, and a bizarre accident caused by a Nuova Simonelli espresso machine secretly installed under his desk, one suspects the 'different versions' are rather like Captain Redbeard Rum's 'opinion is divided on the subject'.
Around the same time his wife, who had been behaving increasingly erratically, was diagnosed with, ultimately fatal, frontotemporal dementia. And has, a couple of weeks before the novel begins, passed away.
All of which means he is now free to work on his life's work, a ground-breaking book-length essay on Montaigne. Except, as the novel progresses we, and at times he, realise he doesn't really have anything insightful to say on the subject, his writing largely consisting of coming up with hundreds of different titles, and going off on research rabbit holes into peripheral topics, this from when his supportive wife, herself an academic in another field, had yet to become ill:
... she still possessed a generous and forgiving nature, always reassuring me about my work-in-progress which amounted to hundreds of titles for a book-length essay but no book-length essay, nothing resembling a book-length essay, hundreds of titles and not much else, a few paragraphs appropriated from my master's thesis, tame observations about Montaigne's influence and relevance, things I'd read in a dozen forgettable books which all said identical things; Montaigne was the first modern thinker, a profound and original thinker, things any academic could've written and which offered nothing new or original in the study of Montaigne and she, meaning my now-dead wife, was always en-couraging, especially about my acceptance to the Zybècksz Archives at the Horner Institute, boasting to her friends and colleagues, Marcel especially, about the prestige of being invited to such an illustrious artists' colony while he tinkered with the piano or skulked to his bedroom, young and sullen, still a teenager, none of us knowing I'd return three months later with nothing but titles, Gardens of Anguish and Mute Pavilion for example, three months in the Berkshires not without their drama, but returning with only a renewed love for literature and additional ideas for my book-length essay but, again, no book-length essay.
His real passion and expertise is in coffee, rants about modern life that would put the narrator of All My Precious Madness to shame and, most of all, digressions about digressions - indeed the title on which he finally settles, as the novel opens, is The Intrusion of Distraction.
His own musings are frequently interrupted by his son Marcel's calls about his passion for house music, which plays a signficant role in the text and, while some of the artists featured are invented, the novel does come with a real-life playlist.
Which also highlights one example of Haber's Bob Mortimer like ability to blend the real and the imagined - whether musicians, anecdotes about Montaigne, the coffee machine (Nuova Simonelli is a real brand, but the actor who is mentioned endorsing it is fictional), or academic institutions, the reader is, wonderfully, unsure, without Google assistance, which is researched and which invented.
One also realises that beneath the rather casual dismissal of his wife's death, the narrator is actually left bereft, and this can also be read as a novel about mourning, and indeed the extended period that involves when a loved one mentally slips away.
... like losing a platoon of loved ones, losing an arm or a leg, losing a language, perhaps the essence of my personality, because my wife was how I related to the world and now that she's gone I can't relate to the world, have no desire to relate to the world...
Although that does point to one feature with this novel. While Haber starts with a comically obsessed narrator, whose "dead wife's" departure is convenient for his literary project he, rightly, I think make him into a more rounded character, but it does lessen the comedy that was so striking in the earlier novels.
And my personal taste certainly doesn't extend to coffee (I'm strictly team tea) or to house music (give me Judas Priest) so those elements of the novel - and one could also argue this is a book about coffee, or a novel about, and patterned after, house music - rather passed me by.
Nevertheless another excellent novel from one of my favourite contemporary writers.
The publisher - Coffee House Press
Coffee House Press began as a small letterpress operation in 1972 and has grown into an internationally renowned nonprofit publisher of literary fiction, essay, poetry, and other work that doesn’t fit neatly into genre categories.
Adventurous readers, arts enthusiasts, community builders, and risk takers—join us.
... she later admitted having trouble getting through it, actually taken aback, she said, by the tone which felt both condescending and misanthropic and the spate of digressions littering the work which suggested a deep longing for solitude, in short, my rather strong feelings about the human race because it was obvious, she said, I had a deep love for humanity which was at odds with the deep loathing I also had for humanity. One can be both, I explained, myself and Montaigne for example, Itold her, cursed by the need to reconcile a love of humanity with a dread of hu-manity, both of us embracing our species as much as holding them in contempt because, I said, look around, and my wonderful wife, now dead, found it curious that I'd acquired my master's degree on the strength of Montaigne and the Lugubrious Cherubs, which, though respecting the effort involved, felt more than a little antagonistic, as well as uneven, poorly researched, and a trifle deranged,...
Lesser Ruins is Mark Haber's 3rd novel after the brilliant Reinhardt's Garden and Saint Sebastian's Abyss. When the epigraphs for a novel are from Daša Drndić, Leonard Tsypkin and Kafka the reader suspects they are in good hands. When they see the author’s name, they know they are.
All of which set my expectations bar very high, and I should say upfront that my 4 star rating is relative to those expectations, but this is still one of the finest novels I've read in 2024, and I look forward to 'Ada', a novella promised in 2026.
The novel, told in Haber's trademark style of 'Thomas Bernhard if he'd grown up watching the Coen Brothers' opens (this only part of a longer sentence):
Anyway, I think, she’s dead, and though I loved her, I now have both the time and freedom to write my essay on Montaigne…
Our narrator is a professor who has left the community college at which he works. Retired or was fired, there are different versions, he tells us throughout the novel, although when one reads about his idiosyncratic teaching style, and a bizarre accident caused by a Nuova Simonelli espresso machine secretly installed under his desk, one suspects the 'different versions' are rather like Captain Redbeard Rum's 'opinion is divided on the subject'.
Around the same time his wife, who had been behaving increasingly erratically, was diagnosed with, ultimately fatal, frontotemporal dementia. And has, a couple of weeks before the novel begins, passed away.
All of which means he is now free to work on his life's work, a ground-breaking book-length essay on Montaigne. Except, as the novel progresses we, and at times he, realise he doesn't really have anything insightful to say on the subject, his writing largely consisting of coming up with hundreds of different titles, and going off on research rabbit holes into peripheral topics, this from when his supportive wife, herself an academic in another field, had yet to become ill:
... she still possessed a generous and forgiving nature, always reassuring me about my work-in-progress which amounted to hundreds of titles for a book-length essay but no book-length essay, nothing resembling a book-length essay, hundreds of titles and not much else, a few paragraphs appropriated from my master's thesis, tame observations about Montaigne's influence and relevance, things I'd read in a dozen forgettable books which all said identical things; Montaigne was the first modern thinker, a profound and original thinker, things any academic could've written and which offered nothing new or original in the study of Montaigne and she, meaning my now-dead wife, was always en-couraging, especially about my acceptance to the Zybècksz Archives at the Horner Institute, boasting to her friends and colleagues, Marcel especially, about the prestige of being invited to such an illustrious artists' colony while he tinkered with the piano or skulked to his bedroom, young and sullen, still a teenager, none of us knowing I'd return three months later with nothing but titles, Gardens of Anguish and Mute Pavilion for example, three months in the Berkshires not without their drama, but returning with only a renewed love for literature and additional ideas for my book-length essay but, again, no book-length essay.
His real passion and expertise is in coffee, rants about modern life that would put the narrator of All My Precious Madness to shame and, most of all, digressions about digressions - indeed the title on which he finally settles, as the novel opens, is The Intrusion of Distraction.
His own musings are frequently interrupted by his son Marcel's calls about his passion for house music, which plays a signficant role in the text and, while some of the artists featured are invented, the novel does come with a real-life playlist.
Which also highlights one example of Haber's Bob Mortimer like ability to blend the real and the imagined - whether musicians, anecdotes about Montaigne, the coffee machine (Nuova Simonelli is a real brand, but the actor who is mentioned endorsing it is fictional), or academic institutions, the reader is, wonderfully, unsure, without Google assistance, which is researched and which invented.
One also realises that beneath the rather casual dismissal of his wife's death, the narrator is actually left bereft, and this can also be read as a novel about mourning, and indeed the extended period that involves when a loved one mentally slips away.
... like losing a platoon of loved ones, losing an arm or a leg, losing a language, perhaps the essence of my personality, because my wife was how I related to the world and now that she's gone I can't relate to the world, have no desire to relate to the world...
Although that does point to one feature with this novel. While Haber starts with a comically obsessed narrator, whose "dead wife's" departure is convenient for his literary project he, rightly, I think make him into a more rounded character, but it does lessen the comedy that was so striking in the earlier novels.
And my personal taste certainly doesn't extend to coffee (I'm strictly team tea) or to house music (give me Judas Priest) so those elements of the novel - and one could also argue this is a book about coffee, or a novel about, and patterned after, house music - rather passed me by.
Nevertheless another excellent novel from one of my favourite contemporary writers.
The publisher - Coffee House Press
Coffee House Press began as a small letterpress operation in 1972 and has grown into an internationally renowned nonprofit publisher of literary fiction, essay, poetry, and other work that doesn’t fit neatly into genre categories.
Adventurous readers, arts enthusiasts, community builders, and risk takers—join us.
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
December 28, 2024
Incredible! 🖤
December 1, 2024
I overidentify with the narrator, coffee notwithstanding. I want peace and quiet and absence of distraction. I even want to write a monograph. So, yes, the story hit pretty close to home. But in the vacillation between the satire of academia and the seriousness of intellectual pursuit (after all, the novel wants to send us a rather serious message), I somehow lost the point of it all. There's a pathos underneath the ridiculousness, and and the text just couldn't hit the right measure with me. That's not to say that I didn't enjoy it, but the fixations overstayed their welcome and I really struggled to reach the (devastating) end.
February 17, 2025
DNF at 20%. I like experimental fiction, but this feels tediously indulgent, snobbish and middle-class Euro/white-centric more than absurd or smart.
October 23, 2025
https://youtu.be/VTx0yBoW-K0?si=xMp2W...
Haber is in top form throughout this book. The narrator recalls The Tunnel by William Gass along with Bernhard’s Old Masters. There is a wonderful sense of irony and pathos across these pages from one of the best living novelists.
Haber is in top form throughout this book. The narrator recalls The Tunnel by William Gass along with Bernhard’s Old Masters. There is a wonderful sense of irony and pathos across these pages from one of the best living novelists.
June 8, 2025
bumped up 4.5. The espresso incident will live rent free in my head for... ever?
February 1, 2025
Read as part of the Republic of Consciousness (US/Can) Prize list
October 4, 2025
If you gave this book to 1000 readers, less than 20 would finish it.
Although I do feel the author is talented, their decision to make this some sort of experimental work deserves derision. The first 100 pages are the same story told over and over. By the end of the 100 pages of Part 1, I wanted the main character to die so I wouldn’t need to read any more about Montaigne, or coffee, or his son’s interest in house music. On top of the above, the author decided to make each 100+ page section a single paragraph.
It took until the last 25% until the author stopped writing like some avant-garde off-off-off-off-Broadway performance artist. I was so mad about being dragged across the broken glass of the first three-quarters of the book, that I have no allowances to offer.
One star. Out of over 700 rated books, I’ve given seven one-star ratings before this one.
Although I do feel the author is talented, their decision to make this some sort of experimental work deserves derision. The first 100 pages are the same story told over and over. By the end of the 100 pages of Part 1, I wanted the main character to die so I wouldn’t need to read any more about Montaigne, or coffee, or his son’s interest in house music. On top of the above, the author decided to make each 100+ page section a single paragraph.
It took until the last 25% until the author stopped writing like some avant-garde off-off-off-off-Broadway performance artist. I was so mad about being dragged across the broken glass of the first three-quarters of the book, that I have no allowances to offer.
One star. Out of over 700 rated books, I’ve given seven one-star ratings before this one.
December 30, 2025
Life is incurable, a long sluggish process of destruction; tediously predictable, all unavoidable,
complicated no doubt by love, death, and the disease of despair, all the
natural villains, and still we go on, still we persist. Why? Why not turn on
the gas or jump from the bridge, I think, when there are no surprises in store
and never have been?
بخش عمده کتاب رو مونولوگهای درونی و افکار گره خورده راوی تشکیل میده و بیش از اینکه اتفاقها در بیرون رخ بده، در ذهنش شکل میگیره نویسنده با مهارت خاصی ما رو به ذهن و افکار مردی که همسرش رو از دست داده و احساس شکست میکنه، وارد میکنه. جنس توصیفات به نوعی هست که انگار ما هم بخشی از رویا و افکار راوی میشیم! اگر از این نوع روایت لذت میبرید انتخاب خوبی میتونه باشه.
پ. ن: کتاب به فارسی ترجمه نشده.
complicated no doubt by love, death, and the disease of despair, all the
natural villains, and still we go on, still we persist. Why? Why not turn on
the gas or jump from the bridge, I think, when there are no surprises in store
and never have been?
بخش عمده کتاب رو مونولوگهای درونی و افکار گره خورده راوی تشکیل میده و بیش از اینکه اتفاقها در بیرون رخ بده، در ذهنش شکل میگیره نویسنده با مهارت خاصی ما رو به ذهن و افکار مردی که همسرش رو از دست داده و احساس شکست میکنه، وارد میکنه. جنس توصیفات به نوعی هست که انگار ما هم بخشی از رویا و افکار راوی میشیم! اگر از این نوع روایت لذت میبرید انتخاب خوبی میتونه باشه.
پ. ن: کتاب به فارسی ترجمه نشده.
January 19, 2025
An impassioned argument for the ineffable boons of art and creation, a diatribe against stupidity and all its clunky manifestations, a crawl through the abyss of existence to find remnants of explorers from eons past, a wail of grief that ceaselessly echoes through a counterfeit night, a slick descent into valleys and gorges of sound, a murmured plea at the doors of memory; it is suffering, clutching at its tatters, refusing to go bare.
I closed the book a bit more forgiving of distraction, a bit more accepting of mediocrity, and a bit more bullheaded towards stupidity. This book asks what it means to grieve, a life, a love, and an ambition, and it leaves you with no answers other than it means nothing; we will all suffer, we will all grieve, and we will all have to face the hard cold hour.
I closed the book a bit more forgiving of distraction, a bit more accepting of mediocrity, and a bit more bullheaded towards stupidity. This book asks what it means to grieve, a life, a love, and an ambition, and it leaves you with no answers other than it means nothing; we will all suffer, we will all grieve, and we will all have to face the hard cold hour.
April 24, 2025
Well done, Mark Haber! I believe that I was able to discern bits of Rodrigo Fresán, Jon Fosse, and Thomas Bernhard, which brought this reader great pleasure in doing so! Creative! Well done indeed!
The reel: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIzzEb...
The reel: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIzzEb...
December 18, 2024
A pained community college professor laments on the death of his wife and the tragedy that is his life's work. This is his stream of consciousness that is marred by obsessive tangents; a full display of a man unravelling.
The journey this story took me on was unhinged, absurd and absolutely beautiful. It was insufferable at times, a breathless tirade that dabbled in misanthropy, but ended on an incredibly thought-provoking commentary on art, passion and grief.
If any of this sounds remotely interesting to you, read this book.
The journey this story took me on was unhinged, absurd and absolutely beautiful. It was insufferable at times, a breathless tirade that dabbled in misanthropy, but ended on an incredibly thought-provoking commentary on art, passion and grief.
If any of this sounds remotely interesting to you, read this book.
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.
January 9, 2025
I read this book for a book club through a locally owned bookstore. I never would’ve found it or read it on my own. The style was incredibly unique to me. The book has 272 pages and is comprised of three paragraphs. A stream of consciousness and so much repetition. Themes include obsession, coffee, house music, grief. Written from the perspective of the main character who seems to be afflicted with a number of neurodiversity issues. It was frequently really funny, but I found it hard to read.
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.
December 20, 2024
Hilarious, melancholic, and mystifying can be thrown around easily, even describing back-to-back sentences in novel that covers just a couple hours of a man’s life deep in the throes or grief and searching that comes after a loved one’s death.
December 7, 2024
This book has put me into a terrible reading slump and not in a good way. I could not even finish it. It was extremely hard to read, run on sentences, very little punctuation and structure that was hard to follow. I would give this book zero stars if I could. The person who chose this book for our book club, had to buy presents in penance to stay in the club (just kidding she bought the presents but we would never have kicked her out). A new low for our 7 year book club.
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.
December 27, 2024
In which Mark Haber continues to demonstrate his rightful seat at the Krasznahorkai/Bernhard/Fosse long sentence table.
February 27, 2025
This book was on my radar before it made the US/Canada 2024 Republic of Consciousness Small Press Prize Longlist as Coffee House Press's submission, but its nomination did bump it up on my priority list of reads.
Obsession, grief, ambition... Central themes throughout this neurotically stream-of-conscious narration. Our dear narrator has been trying to write a ground-breaking book-length essay on Montaigne, but modern day life's interruptions (especially smart phones) have interrupted the mythical vast swathes of time he feels one needs/deserves to contemplate intellectual and artistic pursuits. He's an aesthete amongst charlatans. And his glory would be recognized if only he had the proper time. If only he didn't have to teach. If only his wife wasn't dying. And his son didn't go on ad nauseam about electronic house music. And, well, mainlining coffee does not seem to be helping his case.
Haber fashions a voice that would be grating in its frantic incessantness if it wasn't so humorous and relatable. Not so much a putting the cart before the horse as a title before the book. Possibly inspiring in some instances and crippling in others. It's a book that manages to be what its main character only hopes to be: artistic and successful.
-----------------------------------
I did not vibe as much as I thought I would with his son Marcel's playlist, but I was glad someone had already gone to the trouble to put it together for us readers on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6xr...
I do agree with Marcel that Four Tet is brilliant.
-----------------------------------
"…no one every really knows what’s taking place inside the minds of others, murder or revolution, neglected laundry, the sensual flesh of a dead lover, who can tell, every other human an eternal riddle, whether you’ve just met or shared a bed for decades, all of us a collection of mysteries both dumb and inscrutable."
Obsession, grief, ambition... Central themes throughout this neurotically stream-of-conscious narration. Our dear narrator has been trying to write a ground-breaking book-length essay on Montaigne, but modern day life's interruptions (especially smart phones) have interrupted the mythical vast swathes of time he feels one needs/deserves to contemplate intellectual and artistic pursuits. He's an aesthete amongst charlatans. And his glory would be recognized if only he had the proper time. If only he didn't have to teach. If only his wife wasn't dying. And his son didn't go on ad nauseam about electronic house music. And, well, mainlining coffee does not seem to be helping his case.
Haber fashions a voice that would be grating in its frantic incessantness if it wasn't so humorous and relatable. Not so much a putting the cart before the horse as a title before the book. Possibly inspiring in some instances and crippling in others. It's a book that manages to be what its main character only hopes to be: artistic and successful.
"…what mattered was being companions in this curious life, so strange and beautiful and undeniably tragic…
-----------------------------------
I did not vibe as much as I thought I would with his son Marcel's playlist, but I was glad someone had already gone to the trouble to put it together for us readers on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6xr...
I do agree with Marcel that Four Tet is brilliant.
-----------------------------------
March 24, 2025
Shortlisted for the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses, United States & Canada
love these long sentences, full of grief, humor, light, love, art/artists, musings on coffee, & music. first Faber read, but not the last.
*
the Press: Coffee House Press began as a small letterpress operation in 1972 and has grown into an internationally renowned nonprofit publisher of literary fiction, essay, poetry, and other work that doesn't fit neatly into genre categories.
*
"Do you want to join us?" I was recently asked by an acquaintance when he ran across me alone after midnight in a coffee-house that was already almost deserted.
"No, I don't," I said.
—Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1914
I sought the acclaim before the work, the adulation and adoration my work would elicit, but the work remained elusive and still remains elusive because only yesterday, last mourner gone, front door locked, I went straight to the study, picked up a sample page, read a few lines, and dropped it in disgust because there's nothing worse than catching oneself trying to be intelligent or original when one lacks intelligence or originality; no different than seeing a photograph of yourself taken from a curious angle, glimpsing the crooked nose, the too-large paunch, wanting desperately to believe you're looking at a stranger.
—page 7
I'm tempted to return to the study, sit at my desk, search out the best ideas from my Montaigne essay, extract the small scraps of wisdom and begin anew, but once again my phone chirps, that shrill chirp that births a goddamn knot in my chest each time it chirps, every chirp another attack against sanity and solitude and fucking Christ, I think, growing frustrated, growing antsy and aggrieved, pacing the house in my pale-yellow slippers, the modern world has destroyed the ability to have a single unfettered thought, humankind has demolished discernment and irony, the parsing of ideas with the slightest nuance because all of these require sustained, undisturbed time, time that is now plagued either by interruption or by the anticipation of interruption. What's left, I think, but to grunt at one another like baboons?
Have I, along with the rest of the world, been trained to sabotage myself at every turn, to interject, deflect, change subjects, and consider folly instead?
—13
[…] because without my coffee I was useless, I explained over the phone, or worse, not only useless, but dangerous, not dangerous to others, I quickly clarified, only to myself, a danger to myself and the work I planned wholeheartedly to dive into with a fervency unrivaled and which I already envision, yes, I said, I envision the fervency with which I'll create […]
—50
This was Kleist's fashion: to discuss art and sculpture and the burden of history while smoking her pipe and quite happily I listened and sometimes Kleist offered me coffee and without fail I'd decline because she once mentioned in the most unceremonious manner her habit of drinking ersatz or instant coffee, I forget which, and thus I felt free to refuse since I wasn't a savage nor an imbecile and ersatz or instant coffee shouldn't even be allowed to invoke the word coffee because ersatz or instant coffee is swill, worse than swill, it's swill's bastard cousin, in fact there's nothing in my mind more diabolical and repulsive than ersatz or instant coffee, nothing more demeaning and distasteful than the belief that ersatz or instant coffee has any relationship to coffee itself and simply because the word coffee is in its name, doesn't, in any way, mean that it is coffee, my feelings about this long and complex, probably stronger than they should be, but I kept this to myself, politely declined and instead went inside my own cottage to make a single-sourced Bolivian espresso containing the softest, most aromatic hints of caramel and orange, subtle ties dispensing small jolts of bliss so that when I sat down to consider Montaigne and humanism and the notes I'd taken from a translated copy of a facsimile of Montaigne's diary, I was filled with opti-mism, the facsimile of Montaigne's diary taken from the Tanner Room and ceaselessly studied in the Tanner Reading Room at twenty- to twenty-five-minute inter-vals, depending on how nimble I was feeling, the diary translated by an anonymous scholar in the 1890s, the original enclosed in glass inside the Tobar Pavilion directly behind the quadrangle beside the Rare Manuscript Room, visited by me each week to gaze upon the original scrawl of my hero's handwriting.
—76-7
[…] as if I hadn't stopped by from desperation and dread, for the smallest possibility my coffee had made it through, even as the snow began to fall, turning heavy and abundant, my flesh accosted by a piercing cold as well as the certainty the blizzard had finally and irrevocably arrived, lurching through the wind, retreating to my cottage, contemplating the terror of the void as well as the soundlessness that forever accompanied the terror of the void.
—107
And the students were terror-struck and mute, the coffee was humming in my veins and the euphoria I felt was the harbinger of things to come, calamity or rap-ture, solace or heartbreak, who could say?
—112
[…] I began seeing myself as I once was, that is, a reader, nothing more perfect and pure, I felt, than a reader, especially a serious reader because a serious reader was the most immaculate creature on earth, and by serious reader I meant a reader with romantic sensibilities, one who approached books with hope in their hearts and no concern at all for schools or disciplines, the serious reader seizing each book with wide-eyed possibility because serious readers, I felt, were utopians and every book an attempt at transcending oneself.
—113
[& so many more lovely sentences! first but not last Haber to read!]
love these long sentences, full of grief, humor, light, love, art/artists, musings on coffee, & music. first Faber read, but not the last.
*
the Press: Coffee House Press began as a small letterpress operation in 1972 and has grown into an internationally renowned nonprofit publisher of literary fiction, essay, poetry, and other work that doesn't fit neatly into genre categories.
*
"Do you want to join us?" I was recently asked by an acquaintance when he ran across me alone after midnight in a coffee-house that was already almost deserted.
"No, I don't," I said.
—Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1914
I sought the acclaim before the work, the adulation and adoration my work would elicit, but the work remained elusive and still remains elusive because only yesterday, last mourner gone, front door locked, I went straight to the study, picked up a sample page, read a few lines, and dropped it in disgust because there's nothing worse than catching oneself trying to be intelligent or original when one lacks intelligence or originality; no different than seeing a photograph of yourself taken from a curious angle, glimpsing the crooked nose, the too-large paunch, wanting desperately to believe you're looking at a stranger.
—page 7
I'm tempted to return to the study, sit at my desk, search out the best ideas from my Montaigne essay, extract the small scraps of wisdom and begin anew, but once again my phone chirps, that shrill chirp that births a goddamn knot in my chest each time it chirps, every chirp another attack against sanity and solitude and fucking Christ, I think, growing frustrated, growing antsy and aggrieved, pacing the house in my pale-yellow slippers, the modern world has destroyed the ability to have a single unfettered thought, humankind has demolished discernment and irony, the parsing of ideas with the slightest nuance because all of these require sustained, undisturbed time, time that is now plagued either by interruption or by the anticipation of interruption. What's left, I think, but to grunt at one another like baboons?
Have I, along with the rest of the world, been trained to sabotage myself at every turn, to interject, deflect, change subjects, and consider folly instead?
—13
[…] because without my coffee I was useless, I explained over the phone, or worse, not only useless, but dangerous, not dangerous to others, I quickly clarified, only to myself, a danger to myself and the work I planned wholeheartedly to dive into with a fervency unrivaled and which I already envision, yes, I said, I envision the fervency with which I'll create […]
—50
This was Kleist's fashion: to discuss art and sculpture and the burden of history while smoking her pipe and quite happily I listened and sometimes Kleist offered me coffee and without fail I'd decline because she once mentioned in the most unceremonious manner her habit of drinking ersatz or instant coffee, I forget which, and thus I felt free to refuse since I wasn't a savage nor an imbecile and ersatz or instant coffee shouldn't even be allowed to invoke the word coffee because ersatz or instant coffee is swill, worse than swill, it's swill's bastard cousin, in fact there's nothing in my mind more diabolical and repulsive than ersatz or instant coffee, nothing more demeaning and distasteful than the belief that ersatz or instant coffee has any relationship to coffee itself and simply because the word coffee is in its name, doesn't, in any way, mean that it is coffee, my feelings about this long and complex, probably stronger than they should be, but I kept this to myself, politely declined and instead went inside my own cottage to make a single-sourced Bolivian espresso containing the softest, most aromatic hints of caramel and orange, subtle ties dispensing small jolts of bliss so that when I sat down to consider Montaigne and humanism and the notes I'd taken from a translated copy of a facsimile of Montaigne's diary, I was filled with opti-mism, the facsimile of Montaigne's diary taken from the Tanner Room and ceaselessly studied in the Tanner Reading Room at twenty- to twenty-five-minute inter-vals, depending on how nimble I was feeling, the diary translated by an anonymous scholar in the 1890s, the original enclosed in glass inside the Tobar Pavilion directly behind the quadrangle beside the Rare Manuscript Room, visited by me each week to gaze upon the original scrawl of my hero's handwriting.
—76-7
[…] as if I hadn't stopped by from desperation and dread, for the smallest possibility my coffee had made it through, even as the snow began to fall, turning heavy and abundant, my flesh accosted by a piercing cold as well as the certainty the blizzard had finally and irrevocably arrived, lurching through the wind, retreating to my cottage, contemplating the terror of the void as well as the soundlessness that forever accompanied the terror of the void.
—107
And the students were terror-struck and mute, the coffee was humming in my veins and the euphoria I felt was the harbinger of things to come, calamity or rap-ture, solace or heartbreak, who could say?
—112
[…] I began seeing myself as I once was, that is, a reader, nothing more perfect and pure, I felt, than a reader, especially a serious reader because a serious reader was the most immaculate creature on earth, and by serious reader I meant a reader with romantic sensibilities, one who approached books with hope in their hearts and no concern at all for schools or disciplines, the serious reader seizing each book with wide-eyed possibility because serious readers, I felt, were utopians and every book an attempt at transcending oneself.
—113
[& so many more lovely sentences! first but not last Haber to read!]
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.
November 4, 2025
Reminiscent of Jon Fosse/Bernhard, but after 10 cups of coffee. Obsessive and heartbreaking ramblings about our absurd world, the pitfalls of artistic ambition, and familial grief.
Not me identifying with the narrator and fawning over another book about a depressed middle-aged man… how predictable of me. I took longer than usual to finish this because it hit a little too close to home and had to switch to other books in between.
I dare say Haber will be the next big star in contemporary lit fic. He deserves more attention. This is easily one of the best books I've read in 2025. +6th star for Marcel's dance music mix at the end!
I recalled some indiscriminate morning, waking up beside her, observing the shape of her unconscious back, the slow rise and fall of sleeping breaths, knowing one day she, us, this, would be gone, and how delicate and swiftly obscured those rare moments of naked clarity are, I thought then, and think again now, the seconds which are solemn and good, like that anonymous morning God knows how many years ago, one of thousands, where I awoke and knew enough to observe the passing tremor of time, like the flutter of wings, the finite nature of all of us, it comes and goes in a flash
Not me identifying with the narrator and fawning over another book about a depressed middle-aged man… how predictable of me. I took longer than usual to finish this because it hit a little too close to home and had to switch to other books in between.
I dare say Haber will be the next big star in contemporary lit fic. He deserves more attention. This is easily one of the best books I've read in 2025. +6th star for Marcel's dance music mix at the end!
July 11, 2025
This lovely, intelligent, bittersweet book snuck up on me.
With its long wandering sentences and repetitions, an undecided air about its themes (reflecting something of the protagonist's equivocations), and a plot-free narrative, it initially held my attention only through the beauty of some of the writing and moments of laugh-out-loud humour. However Haber's portrayal of grief and obsession, in a narrator both exquisitely sensitive and amusingly cranky, ultimately coalesces into a moving account of the human creative impulse in an unforgiving world. It won me over. Amid themes of human stupidity and tragedy, and the inevitable march of time, decay and death, the writing reaches for the raw heights (or depths) of emotion as well as the hilarious and encyclopaedic.
With no paragraph breaks, and sentences running amok through numerous commas, Haber's style won't be to everyone's taste. I found it rhythmic and soothing, and it allows for unexpected juxtapositions of the banal and the profound. Haber's erudition also had me reaching frequently for my smartphone (object of frustration and despair in the story!) to find out more about such topics as Norwegian space disco or Ethiopian coffee.
I'm looking forward to reading more of his work.
With its long wandering sentences and repetitions, an undecided air about its themes (reflecting something of the protagonist's equivocations), and a plot-free narrative, it initially held my attention only through the beauty of some of the writing and moments of laugh-out-loud humour. However Haber's portrayal of grief and obsession, in a narrator both exquisitely sensitive and amusingly cranky, ultimately coalesces into a moving account of the human creative impulse in an unforgiving world. It won me over. Amid themes of human stupidity and tragedy, and the inevitable march of time, decay and death, the writing reaches for the raw heights (or depths) of emotion as well as the hilarious and encyclopaedic.
With no paragraph breaks, and sentences running amok through numerous commas, Haber's style won't be to everyone's taste. I found it rhythmic and soothing, and it allows for unexpected juxtapositions of the banal and the profound. Haber's erudition also had me reaching frequently for my smartphone (object of frustration and despair in the story!) to find out more about such topics as Norwegian space disco or Ethiopian coffee.
I'm looking forward to reading more of his work.
March 25, 2025
The “retired or fired” professor drinks way too much coffee and is determined to write a “book-length essay” about Montaigne; his son, Marcel, is equally determined to create the best techno-electronic “house” music mix ever, and probably has a similar problem with some form of stimulant use, based on his excessively long voice mails. Both are so easily distracted by any little thing. Considering that the professor considers himself a humanist, he both loves and hates humanity; he is very critical of his wife’s behavior during her decline and death from frontaltemporal dementia.
A dictionary was put into a blender or, a Nuovo Simonelli espresso machine, along with references, bits and pieces of conversations, philosophy books, and whatever else the professor encountered and remembered; the contents blended, or ground, if you will, into… a book length essay of… frontotemporal dementia?
A dictionary was put into a blender or, a Nuovo Simonelli espresso machine, along with references, bits and pieces of conversations, philosophy books, and whatever else the professor encountered and remembered; the contents blended, or ground, if you will, into… a book length essay of… frontotemporal dementia?
March 6, 2025
I want to preface this by saying that this book perfectly encapsulated what it is, one long stream of consciousness by an unnamed narrator, and as such it is written. Long run-on sentences, jumping around between topics out of the blue, anything a new distraction to the narrators mind.
In it’s execution the book is well fleshed out, but it’s simply not my cup of tea. Truth be told, it was exhausting to read.
Although the premise of some guy trying to write an essay while a close relative is dying of dementia and he is constantly distracted by his caffeine addiction actually is very relatable at this point in my own life.
I really wanted to like this book more, but as it stands, I can only give it 3 stars.
In it’s execution the book is well fleshed out, but it’s simply not my cup of tea. Truth be told, it was exhausting to read.
Although the premise of some guy trying to write an essay while a close relative is dying of dementia and he is constantly distracted by his caffeine addiction actually is very relatable at this point in my own life.
I really wanted to like this book more, but as it stands, I can only give it 3 stars.
December 31, 2025
I chose this book for its high ratings. I am perplexed by those ratings.
The premise of the story is that a professor is struggling to write a book in the wake of his wife’s death.
Due to rambling run-on sentences, tangential thinking, and bizarre punctuation, it appears to be written from the perspective of a man undergoing a mental health crisis. It’s hard to follow and lacks a plot.
The premise of the story is that a professor is struggling to write a book in the wake of his wife’s death.
Due to rambling run-on sentences, tangential thinking, and bizarre punctuation, it appears to be written from the perspective of a man undergoing a mental health crisis. It’s hard to follow and lacks a plot.
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