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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
45 people are currently reading
3,413 people want to read
About the author
Mark Haber
8books116followersMark 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 54 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, theyknowtheyare.
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 essayonMontaigne�
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 underhisdesk, one suspects the 'different versions' are rather like Captain Redbeard Rum's .
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 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 .
Which also highlights one example of Haber's 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, theyknowtheyare.
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 essayonMontaigne�
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 underhisdesk, one suspects the 'different versions' are rather like Captain Redbeard Rum's .
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 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 .
Which also highlights one example of Haber's 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 1, 2025
Read as part of the Republic of Consciousness (US/Can) Prize list
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.
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.
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!]
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.
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.
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 as '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:
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:
I do agree with Marcel that Four Tet is brilliant.
-----------------------------------
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.
Shelved as 'tasted'
November 14, 2024This novel appears to be as gutsy as the amazing , 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.
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.
March 16, 2025
If I ever end up going mad, this is EXACTLY what it will look like.
I’m joking (kind of), but is there anything more relatable to someone like myself than the idea that someday I’ll drink too much coffee and lose my mind by becoming entrenched in unproductive but obsessive research?
That’s the subtle humor of the plot here, but it’s also a masterful “descent into madness� plot that tackles far more serious subject matter than the dangers of over-caffeinating your friendly neighborhood underachieving academic.
In some ways this is a profoundly sad story, about a man grieving the death of his beloved wife as well as his ambitions, lost in a world in which he can’t relate to his son despite how similar they are in many ways, and in which he feels like someone whose interests and talents are out of step with the era in which he lives.
The novel is also a terrific meditation on slow thinking, distraction culture, and the all too common futility of obsession.
St. Sebastian’s Abyss remains my most favorite of Haber’s novels, but this one is also an absolute gem.
*I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.*
I’m joking (kind of), but is there anything more relatable to someone like myself than the idea that someday I’ll drink too much coffee and lose my mind by becoming entrenched in unproductive but obsessive research?
That’s the subtle humor of the plot here, but it’s also a masterful “descent into madness� plot that tackles far more serious subject matter than the dangers of over-caffeinating your friendly neighborhood underachieving academic.
In some ways this is a profoundly sad story, about a man grieving the death of his beloved wife as well as his ambitions, lost in a world in which he can’t relate to his son despite how similar they are in many ways, and in which he feels like someone whose interests and talents are out of step with the era in which he lives.
The novel is also a terrific meditation on slow thinking, distraction culture, and the all too common futility of obsession.
St. Sebastian’s Abyss remains my most favorite of Haber’s novels, but this one is also an absolute gem.
*I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.*
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.
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.
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.
March 9, 2025
So much going on here, such a creative, unique book. Read this.
October 14, 2024
The dude loves coffee.
December 21, 2024
Mark Haber is obsessed with obsession. His first two novels, Reinhardt’s Garden and Saint Sebastian’s Abyss, examined characters obsessed with melancholy and a little known painting. Obsession serves a variety of functions in Haber’s fiction. It can be a vehicle for humor, a driver of danger and adventure, and the foundation and destroyer of friendships. Lesser Ruins sees Haber explore another aspect of obsessions: the ways our obsessions both provide meaning to our lives and distract us from what is most important. A retired professor mourning the death of his wife sits down to write his long-in-production book length essay about the writer Michel de Montaigne. But he can’t. He is beset by distractions stemming from his own obsessions (coffee, his own failures as a scholar) and those of his adult son (EDM), who is looking to share the grief of his mother’s passing with his father.
Lesser Ruins is an emotional book that expertly winds together humor, sorrow, frustration, horror, and about every other emotion you can think of into a 272 page bullet train. It’s an easy book to get caught up in and a difficult one to put down. It has been rewarding to see Haber grow as an author and I eagerly await what he becomes obsessed with next!
Lesser Ruins is an emotional book that expertly winds together humor, sorrow, frustration, horror, and about every other emotion you can think of into a 272 page bullet train. It’s an easy book to get caught up in and a difficult one to put down. It has been rewarding to see Haber grow as an author and I eagerly await what he becomes obsessed with next!
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.�
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.
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.
March 9, 2025
Rating: 3 very grouchy stars of five
Winner announced 12 March 2025
The Publisher Says: 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.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: I connected with this sad-sack whiner in his grief for his dead wife, and his beautifully evoked love for coffee.
Apart from that, I loathed him and wanted him to shut his moan-hole.
I live (involuntarily and with poor grace) in proximity to a grievance-led, dementia-addled, old drunk. This is like reading the smart version of him venting his legit sadness and tiresome regrets in the key of "they done me wrong" on endless repeat.
I think this book is better than I perceive it to be, due to my own life's issues and difficulties. It has to be, to have elicited from me the degree of irritated disgust with its protagdonist that it did. Had it been simply a poor job of writing or storytelling, I'd simply have Pearl-Ruled it and moved on with my day.
Read the free sample that Kindle offers you, you'll know right away if this resonates with you, and if the resonance is on a frequency you enjoy reverberating to. I very much did not like this read. The reasons I've given suggest to me that others without my life circumstances will feel otherwise.
My rating being an expression of my personal pleasure in the read explains its paltriness. You will most likely, or so I hope, disagree with me.
Winner announced 12 March 2025
The Publisher Says: 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.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: I connected with this sad-sack whiner in his grief for his dead wife, and his beautifully evoked love for coffee.
Apart from that, I loathed him and wanted him to shut his moan-hole.
I live (involuntarily and with poor grace) in proximity to a grievance-led, dementia-addled, old drunk. This is like reading the smart version of him venting his legit sadness and tiresome regrets in the key of "they done me wrong" on endless repeat.
I think this book is better than I perceive it to be, due to my own life's issues and difficulties. It has to be, to have elicited from me the degree of irritated disgust with its protagdonist that it did. Had it been simply a poor job of writing or storytelling, I'd simply have Pearl-Ruled it and moved on with my day.
Read the free sample that Kindle offers you, you'll know right away if this resonates with you, and if the resonance is on a frequency you enjoy reverberating to. I very much did not like this read. The reasons I've given suggest to me that others without my life circumstances will feel otherwise.
My rating being an expression of my personal pleasure in the read explains its paltriness. You will most likely, or so I hope, disagree with me.
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