Bøker av Mark Haber

"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 and grief, 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, raging meditation on ambition, grief, and humanity's ecstatic, agonizing search for meaning through art"--

The spiritual cousin to Blue Self Portrait by Noémi Lefebvre-much of the book takes place during a transatlantic flight.For readers of Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard, The Death of Francis Bacon by Max Porter, and Hold Fast to Your Crown by Yannick Haenel. Features Mark's signature absurdism: serious, strange, weird, and humorous aIl at the same time. In contrast to Reinhardt's Garden, Saint Sebastian's Abyss is written in short, bite-sized snippets that gather momentum as they go. A book about obsession, belief, doubt, and the heart vs. the mind. Also about elitism and the gatekeepers of art, whether painting or literature.

In this delightfully dense, fast-paced comedy with notes of Laszlo Krasznahorkai and Saul Bellow, Jacov and his scribe cross continents in search of the legendary prophet of melancholic philosophy.