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“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��
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“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��
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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
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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