Reinhardt's Garden
-
-
2.0 • 2 Ratings
-
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
In this delightfully dense, fast-paced comedy with notes of László Krasznahorkai and Saul Bellow, Jacov and his scribe cross continents in search of the legendary prophet of melancholic philosophy.
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Haber's debut novel (after the collection Deathbed Conversions) is an exhilarating fever dream about the search for the secret of melancholy. The story opens in 1907, in the forests of Uruguay, as Croatian Jacov Reinhardt searches for Emiliano Gomez Carrasquilla, a reclusive writer who Reinhardt believes holds the key to understanding melancholy an all-consuming emotion for Reinhardt and the subject of a treatise he's desperately trying to complete. At the story's outset, 10 men have already died on the expedition, and it seems to the book's unnamed narrator, Reinhardt's longtime factotum, that they're going in circles. As the doomed expedition plods about, the narrator slips into his memories of Reinhardt: his cataloguing of different nationalities' melancholic characters ("A Russian was a downright brilliant melancholic but was in love with his own melancholia so that it was sentimental and embarrassing"), his construction of a weird castle in Stuttgart with fake walls and trap doors, and his relationship with a retired prostitute named Sonja. The true pleasure of Haber's novel a single paragraph is how it swirls and doubles back on itself on both a story level, with memories bleeding into one another, and on a prose level: Reinhardt seeks "to unearth the melancholy at the root of joy, or perhaps the joy at the root of melancholy, because the order, he said, has always been immaterial." Haber's dizzying vision dextrously leads readers right into the melancholic heart of darkness.
