Lesser Ruins
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A community college professor flounders while attempting to write a book on Montaigne in Haber's sharp if occasionally strained comic novel (after Saint Sebastian's Abyss). The unnamed narrator has spent years working on the project with little to show except for tangential research on such subjects as Balzac's supposed death by coffee. In the interim, he's lost his wife to dementia, a beloved colleague has died by suicide, and he's scarcely looked up from his work. For the narrator, everything is a distraction to be removed, including family members and friends. Haber derives comedy from repetition, such as the narrator's obsession with coffee, often his subject and the fuel for it ("I decide to make coffee in order to not write about coffee and not think about coffee, assuming I'd written so much about coffee only yesterday from a desire to have coffee"). He also plants goofy digs at the pretensions of academia, such as naming other scholars after hockey player Etienne Desjardins and Ping Pong champ István Boros. Haber borrows stylistically from Thomas Bernhard, and though the material doesn't have quite the same edge (the narrator's comparatively low-bore complaints target smartphones and his son's electronic music), the narrator's breathless voice is generally invigorating. Patient readers will enjoy this digressive project.
