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A late contender for my novel of 2019 - a book owing an acknowledged debt to some of the finest authors in world literature over the last 60 years: Thomas Bernard (the master), Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Roberto Bolaño, Borges, Daša Drndić, WG Sebald, Laszlo Krasznahorkai and Wolfgang Hilbig, amongst others, but above all to "a little-known author, as significant as she is obscure, whose hands unmistakably shaped the structure, style and themes of Reinhardt’s Garden, a writer ostensibly erased from literary history."

Set in the jungles of Uruguay in 1907, and looking back to the Europe of the previous decade, the unnamed first person narrator, a hypochondriac of the first order, is on a seemingly doomed expedition with his mentor and Croatian countryman, Jacov, heir to the Reinhardt tobacco empire. A former student and now sworn enemy of the philosopher Otto Klein, Jacov is now writing his own groundbreaking work on the topic of melancholy, a transformational worldview he regards as key to society. An aficionado of Wagner, Caravaggio, Tolstoy, he was driven from the latter's estate for offences against morality, and has now gone in search, in the style of Alexander von Humboldt, of the legendary lost greatest philosopher of melancholy of all, Emiliano Gomez Carrasquilla.

A wonderful novel - inventive, erudite, very funny, philosophical and steeped in world literature, dealing, as the "with melancholy and hubris and obsession" and ending with a note of (in historic hindsight) .

And a great companion to the novel that opened 2019 for me - the equally brilliant and Bernhardian Panthers and the Museum of Fire by Jen Craig, and this of Haber links the two (albeit judging from a recent twitter exchange () Haber had not read Craig's novel.

5 stars - highly recommended.