Mark Haber

"What I wanted more than anything was to be standing beside Schmidt, in concert with Schmidt, at the foot of Saint Sebastian's Abyss along with Schmidt, hands cupped to the sides of our faces, debating art, transcendence and the glory of the apocalypse." Former best friends who built their careers writing about a single work of art meet after a decades-long falling out. One of them, called to the other's deathbed for unknown reasons by way of a "relatively short" nine page email, spends his flight to Berlin reflecting on Renaissance painter Count Hugo Beckenbaur and his masterpiece, Saint Sebastian's Abyss, the work that established both men as important art critics and also destroyed their relationship. A darkly comic meditation on art, obsession, and the enigmatic power of friendship, Saint Sebastian's Abyss stalks the museum halls of Europe, feverishly seeking salvation, annihilation, and the meaning of belief.

Saint Sebastian's Abyss

At the turn of the twentieth century, as he composes a treatise on melancholy, Jacov Reinhardt sets off from his small Croatian village in search of his hero and unwitting mentor, Emiliano Gomez Carrasquilla, who is rumored to have disappeared into the South American jungle—“not lost, mind you, but retired.” Jacov’s narcissistic preoccupation with melancholy consumes him, and as he desperately recounts the myth of his journey to his trusted but ailing scribe, hope for an encounter with the lost philosopher who holds the key to Jacov’s obsession seems increasingly unlikely. From Croatia to Germany, Hungary to Russia, and finally to the Americas, Jacov and his companions grapple with the limits of art, colonialism, and escapism in this antic debut where dark satire and skewed history converge.

Reinhardt's Garden

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.

Lesser Ruins

“What I wanted more than anything was to be standing beside Schmidt, in concert with Schmidt, at the foot of Saint Sebastian’s Abyss along with Schmidt, hands cupped to the sides of our faces, debating art, transcendence, and the glory of the apocalypse.” Former best friends who built their careers writing about a single work of art meet after a decades-long falling-out. One of them, called to the other’s deathbed for unknown reasons by a “relatively short” nine-page email, spends his flight to Berlin reflecting on Dutch Renaissance painter Count Hugo Beckenbauer and his masterpiece, Saint Sebastian’s Abyss, the work that established both men as important art critics and also destroyed their relationship. A darkly comic meditation on art, obsession, and the enigmatic power of friendship, Saint Sebastian’s Abyss stalks the museum halls of Europe, feverishly seeking salvation, annihilation, and the meaning of belief.

Escrito em um só parágrafo, como um monólogo febril, o romance de estreia de Mark Haber evoca clássicos como O coração das trevas, de Joseph Conrad, ao reconstruir uma viagem por vários continentes até culminar na selva sul-americana, encerrando uma busca obsessiva por um homem desaparecido que possuiria o derradeiro segredo a respeito da melancolia. Igualmente filosófico e hilário, O jardim de Reinhardt se tornou um livro cultuado comparado a obras de Thomas Bernhard e László Krasznahorkai. "Com uma prosa tão certeira quanto um dardo venenoso, Mark Haber conduz o leitor a uma jornada delirante ao coração da melancolia." SJÓN "Um desses livros perfeitos que parecem pequenos, exóticos e melancólicos de fora, mas, depois que entramos nele, mostra-se imenso e exultante da melhor maneira possível." RODRIGO FRESÁN

O jardim de Reinhardt

«Un aventurado viaje al país de la melancolía. Una disección fascinante de la vulnerabilidad humana». GUADALUPE NETTEL «Con una prosa tan certera como un dardo envenenado, Mark Haber conduce al lector a un viaje delirante hacia el corazón de la melancolía». SJÓN «La melancolía nunca ha sido más eufórica que en la novela de Mark Haber». HERNÁN DÍAZ «Uno de esos libros perfectos que desde fuera parecen pequeños, exóticos y melancólicos pero que, una vez dentro, son inmensos y exultantes. Piensen en Amuleto de Roberto Bolaño, piensen en El bosque de la noche de Djuna Barnes, piensen en Sueños de trenes de Denis Johnson, piensen en Ancho mar de los Sargazos de Jean Rhys, piensen en Zama de Antonio Di Benedetto, piensen en El malogrado de Thomas Bernhard. Piensen». RODRIGO FRESÁN A comienzos del siglo XX, Jacov Reinhardt, obsesionado con componer un tratado sobre la esencia de la melancolía, abandona su pequeño pueblo en Croacia para internarse junto a su fiel amanuense en lo más profundo de la selva sudamericana, en una búsqueda quijotesca en pos de Emiliano Gómez Carrasquilla, su preclaro mentor. Seguir en su empresa al alucinado Reinhardt ;al que alimenta una cantidad de cocaína que ni el mismísimo Freud habría conseguido gestionar; es adentrarse en un fascinante laberinto literario que se extiende desde las crónicas del siglo XVI de Ulrich Schmidl hasta los decadentistas del fin de siècle, y en el que resuenan igualmente las novelas de Roberto Bolaño o Mathias Énard y el cine del Werner Herzog de Fitzcarraldo y del más lisérgico Terry Gilliam.

Mark Haber

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