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“[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 [. . .]��

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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.