What do you think?
Rate this book
El jardín de Reinhardt
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.
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.
136 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 14, 2019
26 people are currently reading
1913 people want to read
About the author
Mark Haber
10 books149 followersMark Haber was born in Washington DC and grew up in Florida. His first collection of stories, DEATHBED CONVERSIONS (2008), was translated into Spanish in a bilingual edition as MELVILLE'S BEARD (2017) by Editorial Argonáutica. His debut novel, REINHARDT'S GARDEN, was published by Coffee House Press in October 2019 and later nominated for the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut novel. His second novel, SAINT SEBASTIAN'S ABYSS, will also be published by Coffee House Press. Mark is the operations manager and a bookseller at Brazos Bookstore in Houston, Texas.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 110 reviews
January 12, 2026
A great novel by Mark Haber, whose circular and elyptic style, akin to that of Bernhard, is more European than American. A witty, fun and absorbing story told by the Croatian hypochondriac assistant of Jacov Reinhardt, the heir of a huge tobacco-funded fortune and a life-long thinker and philosopher whose main and actually only object of interest and study is melancholy, and which led him to a doomed journey into South America.
A short novel filled with funny passages, like the one with Elsa Weber in Cologne, and clever associations, like the one between dust and melancholy.
A short novel filled with funny passages, like the one with Elsa Weber in Cologne, and clever associations, like the one between dust and melancholy.
October 14, 2024
On the one hand a rollicking tale of an expedition to the jungle gone wrong, and on the other hand a satirical commentary that questions if any obsession is as bad as what the leaders of the 20th century brought to their subjects
For what is the past than a collective dream, shared by the dream’s characters
With unforgettable characters, Reinhardt's Garden starts off in 1907, in the jungle of what is likely Uruguay. Our narrator is a hypochondriac cheesemaker’s son who is a suppressed Croatian homosexual. He serves the titular Jacuv Reinhardt, a cocaine addicted red-haired man who screws an ex-prostitute with one leg and is an heir to a tobacco fortune. If this sounds over the top, you haven't heard any of the dialogues in respect to opposing philosophy schools Jacuv has during the book. Their respective conversations make the book understatedly funny.
The plot of Reinhardt's Garden, full of esoteric schools of philosophy and Jacuv being unsuccessful in all his ventures, including renovating the Stuttgart family castle by Pierre Cuypers, is quite thin. There is an overall quest to find an ultimate treatise on Melancholy (None of us realise it but melancholy is the engine of human progress) and an elusive philosopher.
The narrative voice of both our servant and the rants of his master, which he records verbatim, enliven the text, featuring often hilarious repetitions and exuberant dialogues. Also the obsession of our narrator with Jacuv, and in particular his hair (I worshiped at the altar of Jacob) is kind of hilarious.
In the end a short stint at Lev Tolstoi (including screwing his niece) leads to sanatorium stays and an expedition to Uruguay to find the greatest philosopher humorist (and the first) in history. Complete reversal of his philosophy is used by Jacuv to vindicate a life of debauchery.
Despite the small size a book which covers a lot and feels like a fever dream. It made me think of Madness is Better than Defeat of Ned Beauman, equally set in a jungle and featuring main characters and a plot which without much imagination might be called crazy. In terms of reflectiveness of a main character Saint Sebastian's Abyss, the follow up novel of Mark Haber came to mind as well.
An interesting read that makes one think more than you might expect for a c. 150 page novel. I will keep an eye out for what Haber writes next!
For what is the past than a collective dream, shared by the dream’s characters
With unforgettable characters, Reinhardt's Garden starts off in 1907, in the jungle of what is likely Uruguay. Our narrator is a hypochondriac cheesemaker’s son who is a suppressed Croatian homosexual. He serves the titular Jacuv Reinhardt, a cocaine addicted red-haired man who screws an ex-prostitute with one leg and is an heir to a tobacco fortune. If this sounds over the top, you haven't heard any of the dialogues in respect to opposing philosophy schools Jacuv has during the book. Their respective conversations make the book understatedly funny.
The plot of Reinhardt's Garden, full of esoteric schools of philosophy and Jacuv being unsuccessful in all his ventures, including renovating the Stuttgart family castle by Pierre Cuypers, is quite thin. There is an overall quest to find an ultimate treatise on Melancholy (None of us realise it but melancholy is the engine of human progress) and an elusive philosopher.
The narrative voice of both our servant and the rants of his master, which he records verbatim, enliven the text, featuring often hilarious repetitions and exuberant dialogues. Also the obsession of our narrator with Jacuv, and in particular his hair (I worshiped at the altar of Jacob) is kind of hilarious.
In the end a short stint at Lev Tolstoi (including screwing his niece) leads to sanatorium stays and an expedition to Uruguay to find the greatest philosopher humorist (and the first) in history. Complete reversal of his philosophy is used by Jacuv to vindicate a life of debauchery.
Despite the small size a book which covers a lot and feels like a fever dream. It made me think of Madness is Better than Defeat of Ned Beauman, equally set in a jungle and featuring main characters and a plot which without much imagination might be called crazy. In terms of reflectiveness of a main character Saint Sebastian's Abyss, the follow up novel of Mark Haber came to mind as well.
An interesting read that makes one think more than you might expect for a c. 150 page novel. I will keep an eye out for what Haber writes next!
December 7, 2019
A late contender for my novel of 2019 - a book owing an acknowledged debt to some of the finest authors in world literature over the last 60 years: Thomas Bernard (the master), Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Roberto Bolaño, Borges, Daša Drndić, WG Sebald, Laszlo Krasznahorkai and Wolfgang Hilbig, amongst others, but above all to Mila Menendez Krause "a little-known author, as significant as she is obscure, whose hands unmistakably shaped the structure, style and themes of Reinhardt’s Garden, a writer ostensibly erased from literary history."
Set in the jungles of Uruguay in 1907, and looking back to the Europe of the previous decade, the unnamed first person narrator, a hypochondriac of the first order, is on a seemingly doomed expedition with his mentor and Croatian countryman, Jacov, heir to the Reinhardt tobacco empire. A former student and now sworn enemy of the philosopher Otto Klein, Jacov is now writing his own groundbreaking work on the topic of melancholy, a transformational worldview he regards as key to society. An aficionado of Wagner, Caravaggio, Tolstoy, he was driven from the latter's estate for offences against morality, and has now gone in search, in the style of Alexander von Humboldt, of the legendary lost greatest philosopher of melancholy of all, Emiliano Gomez Carrasquilla.
A wonderful novel - inventive, erudite, very funny, philosophical and steeped in world literature, dealing, as the author has said "with melancholy and hubris and obsession" and ending with a note of (in historic hindsight) horribly misplaced optimism.
And a great companion to the novel that opened 2019 for me - the equally brilliant and Bernhardian Panthers and the Museum of Fire by Jen Craig, and this interviewer of Haber links the two (albeit judging from a recent twitter exchange (https://twitter.com/fulcherpaul/statu...) Haber had not read Craig's novel.
5 stars - highly recommended.
Set in the jungles of Uruguay in 1907, and looking back to the Europe of the previous decade, the unnamed first person narrator, a hypochondriac of the first order, is on a seemingly doomed expedition with his mentor and Croatian countryman, Jacov, heir to the Reinhardt tobacco empire. A former student and now sworn enemy of the philosopher Otto Klein, Jacov is now writing his own groundbreaking work on the topic of melancholy, a transformational worldview he regards as key to society. An aficionado of Wagner, Caravaggio, Tolstoy, he was driven from the latter's estate for offences against morality, and has now gone in search, in the style of Alexander von Humboldt, of the legendary lost greatest philosopher of melancholy of all, Emiliano Gomez Carrasquilla.
A wonderful novel - inventive, erudite, very funny, philosophical and steeped in world literature, dealing, as the author has said "with melancholy and hubris and obsession" and ending with a note of (in historic hindsight) horribly misplaced optimism.
And a great companion to the novel that opened 2019 for me - the equally brilliant and Bernhardian Panthers and the Museum of Fire by Jen Craig, and this interviewer of Haber links the two (albeit judging from a recent twitter exchange (https://twitter.com/fulcherpaul/statu...) Haber had not read Craig's novel.
5 stars - highly recommended.
December 2, 2019
A frenzied short novel much longer than its page count, with flowing, unexpected jumps, quick yet dense, like coca-addled macheting through dense passages, every vine of which seems attentively composed and yields a sly sense of humor when savored, all part of a grander irony since it's really a joyful homage to so many old-timey Euro influences albeit superficially about melancholy -- that is, the narrator and primary character focus on melancholy but the vibe conveyed by the author overall is one of joy and love for a certain sort of lit. Shelve next to Cesar Aira's An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, Werner Herzog's Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo, Rodrigo Hasbun's Los afectos, and even Terence McKenna's True Hallucinations, all of which use the South American jungle to reflect the convoluted particularities of peculiar characters. Have to admit I felt somewhat subtweeted with the Bernhard-y rants early on ripping Klein's cult of fun (also a line about translating a single book and calling yourself a translator) -- if I were a better reviewer I'd cast these impressions as a repetitive rant about this Haberian novel. Otherwise, like Joao Reis's recent The Translator's Bride, my single lingering impression is that it seems like there's a sub-genre developing of novels lovingly derived from "classic" pre-WWII Euro lit, that reanimate and play with those prose styles and tropes, and thereby create something oddly new.
March 8, 2026
https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2026...
“ya que Croacia y la tierra croata le traían a la mente los recuerdos más espantosos e inextricables de su juventud. Maldigo esta repugnante tierra croata, despotricaba , esta tierra me da urticaria, bramaba, esta tierra, que es más endeble y descompuesta y cruel que otras tierras. Deseando estoy de cruzar la frontera, porque no hay país que tenga una tierra tan fea..
y en cuanto entremos en Austria, me bajaré del carruaje y besaré la tierra austríaca, no porque sea tierra austríaca, que no es diferente de la serbia, la húngara o la eslovena, ¡sino solo porque no es tierra croata!"
En la crónica que escribí sobre "El abismo de San Sebastián", la novela con la que descubrí a Mark Haber, contaba que a lo largo de los años ha dejado de interesarme leer críticas sobre libros o cine precisamente porque casi siempre tengo la impresión de que no se despierta la curiosidad por esa obra a través del mundo de las sensaciones o las impresiones, sino que siempre acabo teniendo la impresión de que los críticos oficiales se centran más en ellos mismos que en la obra que vienen a discutir: una critica académica que pretende ser tan objetiva que al final acaba olvidándose de la obra en cuestión, y el ejercicio se acaba convirtiendo en un destripe con puntos y comas de un libro, por ejemplo, o una película, sin dejar espacio al lector para que pueda sentir un mínimo de curiosidad. Este se podría decir que era un tema importante en aquella novela y aquí en El jardín de Reinhardt, se vuelve a abordar lo mismo más o menos, en la que Haber construye una parodia del mundo de los escritores olvidados y de la crítica literaria, y lo hace con ese tono humorístico que tanto me llamó la atención en esa otra novela que realmente es posterior a ésta. La dimensión más interesante del humor en El jardín de Reinhardt es que funciona como parodia del mundo literario, especialmente de tres cosas: los escritores olvidados, los críticos obsesivos y el propio acto de interpretar literatura. Mark Haber construye la novela casi como un juego entre él y el lector.
El argumento es deliberadamente mínimo tal como era en El abismo de San Sebastián: a comienzos del siglo XX, Jacov Reinhardt se obsesiona con escribir un tratado sobre la esencia de la melancolía, de modo que abandona su pequeño pueblo de Croacia para internarse junto a su fiel amanuense, un narrador sin nombre, en lo más profundo de la selva sudamericana en una búsqueda de Emiliano Gómez Carrasquilla al que considera su mentor. El narrador sin nombre, a partir de fragmentos, recuerdos, hipótesis interpretativas intenta reconstruir la figura de su admirado Jacov Reinhardt. Lo hilarante es que lo que yo creía que iba a ser una novela en torno al viaje a Sudamérica a la búsqueda de Carrasquilla, se convierte en una pura digresión en la que el narrador sin nombre abandona la narrativa en torno al viaje para internarse en una variante de historias una tras otra, sin saber exactamente el lector donde está situado. ¿No iban a internarse en la selva buscando a Carrasquilla??? Estas digresiones me hicieron dudar en varios momentos de dónde me encontraba situada en la historia en una novela que me arrancó más de una carcajada.
"explicaba las ideas más sutiles y originales sobre la más esquiva de las emociones: la melancolía, que no es un sentimiento, sino un estado de ánimo; no es un color, sino un matiz; no es la depresión pero la felicidad tampoco, un ámbito enigmático..."
Realmente el tema base en la vida de Jacov Reinhardt, el estudio de la melancolía, podría funcionar como una excusa, o un motor para la digresión, pero no solo es un pretexto narrativo, también es la atmósfera psicológica lo que hace posible que el narrador sin nombre se desvíe continuamente de su pensamiento errante, de modo que llegué a la conclusión de que el verdadero personaje de la novela no es Jacov Reinhardt sino la mente obsesiva que intenta reconstruirlo, el narrador sin nombre, el amanuense. En la novela, Reinhardt aparece como un escritor misterioso, casi mítico, al que algunos estudiosos consideran importantísimo pero casi nadie lo ha leído, sus libros apenas circulan, y apenas se sabe nada de él. Lo que sabemos de él lo está construyendo frente a nuestros ojos el amanuense, se puede decir que le está dando una nueva identidad. El narrador trata a Reinhardt como si fuera un genio comparable a grandes figuras de la literatura europea, pero el lector percibe que esa grandeza está construida más por la obsesión de los críticos que por las obras mismas, y en este caso, se va construyendo paso a paso por el narrador, el único punto de vista. La novela se burla suavemente de la idea de que la literatura siempre tenga un significado profundo y se preste a mil interpretaciones, la fascinación por los autores marginales en espera a ser descubiertos, un fenómeno que no tiene mucho que ver con los mismos autores sino con lo que se montan en la cabeza ciertas mentes obsesionadas en descubrir algo de la nada, porque a veces son realmente la nada. El humor soterrado surge del contraste entre la grandeza proclamada y la falta de pruebas.
"Los filósofos han tildado la melancolía de enfermedad, aseguran que es una tristeza sin razón, pero yo estaba convencido de que era la tristeza de la razón. Cuando uno está melancólico ve la realidad con total lucidez."
Para mí el rasgo que mejor identifica las dos novelas de Mark Haber es precisamente ese humor tan particular que se gasta: no es un humor de situaciones cómicas directas, sino más bien obsesivo y ligeramente absurdo, que surge del propio modo en que el narrador piensa y habla. Habla sin parar en un monólogo obsesivo construyéndose un personaje en su mente, Reinhardt, disfrazando de erudición desmesurada lo que pronto seremos conscientes de que realmente poco o nada sabe de él. El narrador analizará cada detalle como si fuera algo trascendental consiguiendo un humor muy sutil, y se podría decir que este humor nace precisamente de lo serio y erudito que se cree, y la ridiculez de su obsesión, porque esa figura adorada realmente podría ser el vacío.
"así que "La Muerte De Iván Ilich" era un completo misterio, apareció con un golpetazo ensordecedor entre la rutinaria pila, y, aunque se parecía a otros libros, lo que contenía dentro le arrqncó el alma ."
En la novela, el protagonista Jacov Reinhardt y su círculo pasan por Rusia y visitan a Tolstói durante sus viajes antes de la expedición a Sudamérica. Haber mezcla personajes históricos reales con personajes inventados. Tolstói aparece como una figura real dentro de ese universo narrativo, mientras que otros nombres que suenan históricos (como ciertos filósofos o psicólogos) son ficticios. Este procedimiento crea una sensación de historia intelectual europea “real”, aunque muchas piezas del rompecabezas estén inventadas. Haber utiliza a Tolstói para algo muy característico de su novela: difumina la frontera entre historia real y ficción y crea un simil imaginario de la melancolía. El lector, como ocurre a menudo en el libro, no siempre sabe qué es histórico y qué es inventado, lo cual forma parte del humor y del estilo del relato.
Me interesa mucho Mark Haber, por un lado, se burla del fenómeno del “genio olvidado”: autores apenas leídos cuya supuesta grandeza son defendidos con fervor por pequeños círculos de estudiosos. Por otro, caricaturiza el estilo de la crítica académica, capaz de inflar infinitamente detalles mínimos. Pero la parodia nunca es cruel. En el fondo el libro expresa un amor genuino por la literatura y por quienes la estudian con pasión. La inocencia erudita del narrador tiene un fondo de afecto y pura melancolía porque se obsesiona por el deseo de salvar a Reinhardt del olvido y a través de este viaje lo que hace es construirse un personaje en su mente que realmente no tiene nada que ver con la realidad. Quizás Mark Haber lo que quiere es sugerir que tal vez Reinhardt no fue tan importante, pero también que el impulso de rescatarlo dice algo esencial de su narrador, y sobre quienes aman los libros. Me encanta Mark Haber.
"y cómo había empezado nuestro vínculo en lo que parecía el.pasado remoto, fábula o sueño todo ello ya, pues ¿qué es el pasado sino un sueño colectivo compartido por los personajes del sueño?"
♫♫♫ Melancholy - Human Tetris ♫♫♫
“ya que Croacia y la tierra croata le traían a la mente los recuerdos más espantosos e inextricables de su juventud. Maldigo esta repugnante tierra croata, despotricaba , esta tierra me da urticaria, bramaba, esta tierra, que es más endeble y descompuesta y cruel que otras tierras. Deseando estoy de cruzar la frontera, porque no hay país que tenga una tierra tan fea..
y en cuanto entremos en Austria, me bajaré del carruaje y besaré la tierra austríaca, no porque sea tierra austríaca, que no es diferente de la serbia, la húngara o la eslovena, ¡sino solo porque no es tierra croata!"
En la crónica que escribí sobre "El abismo de San Sebastián", la novela con la que descubrí a Mark Haber, contaba que a lo largo de los años ha dejado de interesarme leer críticas sobre libros o cine precisamente porque casi siempre tengo la impresión de que no se despierta la curiosidad por esa obra a través del mundo de las sensaciones o las impresiones, sino que siempre acabo teniendo la impresión de que los críticos oficiales se centran más en ellos mismos que en la obra que vienen a discutir: una critica académica que pretende ser tan objetiva que al final acaba olvidándose de la obra en cuestión, y el ejercicio se acaba convirtiendo en un destripe con puntos y comas de un libro, por ejemplo, o una película, sin dejar espacio al lector para que pueda sentir un mínimo de curiosidad. Este se podría decir que era un tema importante en aquella novela y aquí en El jardín de Reinhardt, se vuelve a abordar lo mismo más o menos, en la que Haber construye una parodia del mundo de los escritores olvidados y de la crítica literaria, y lo hace con ese tono humorístico que tanto me llamó la atención en esa otra novela que realmente es posterior a ésta. La dimensión más interesante del humor en El jardín de Reinhardt es que funciona como parodia del mundo literario, especialmente de tres cosas: los escritores olvidados, los críticos obsesivos y el propio acto de interpretar literatura. Mark Haber construye la novela casi como un juego entre él y el lector.
El argumento es deliberadamente mínimo tal como era en El abismo de San Sebastián: a comienzos del siglo XX, Jacov Reinhardt se obsesiona con escribir un tratado sobre la esencia de la melancolía, de modo que abandona su pequeño pueblo de Croacia para internarse junto a su fiel amanuense, un narrador sin nombre, en lo más profundo de la selva sudamericana en una búsqueda de Emiliano Gómez Carrasquilla al que considera su mentor. El narrador sin nombre, a partir de fragmentos, recuerdos, hipótesis interpretativas intenta reconstruir la figura de su admirado Jacov Reinhardt. Lo hilarante es que lo que yo creía que iba a ser una novela en torno al viaje a Sudamérica a la búsqueda de Carrasquilla, se convierte en una pura digresión en la que el narrador sin nombre abandona la narrativa en torno al viaje para internarse en una variante de historias una tras otra, sin saber exactamente el lector donde está situado. ¿No iban a internarse en la selva buscando a Carrasquilla??? Estas digresiones me hicieron dudar en varios momentos de dónde me encontraba situada en la historia en una novela que me arrancó más de una carcajada.
"explicaba las ideas más sutiles y originales sobre la más esquiva de las emociones: la melancolía, que no es un sentimiento, sino un estado de ánimo; no es un color, sino un matiz; no es la depresión pero la felicidad tampoco, un ámbito enigmático..."
Realmente el tema base en la vida de Jacov Reinhardt, el estudio de la melancolía, podría funcionar como una excusa, o un motor para la digresión, pero no solo es un pretexto narrativo, también es la atmósfera psicológica lo que hace posible que el narrador sin nombre se desvíe continuamente de su pensamiento errante, de modo que llegué a la conclusión de que el verdadero personaje de la novela no es Jacov Reinhardt sino la mente obsesiva que intenta reconstruirlo, el narrador sin nombre, el amanuense. En la novela, Reinhardt aparece como un escritor misterioso, casi mítico, al que algunos estudiosos consideran importantísimo pero casi nadie lo ha leído, sus libros apenas circulan, y apenas se sabe nada de él. Lo que sabemos de él lo está construyendo frente a nuestros ojos el amanuense, se puede decir que le está dando una nueva identidad. El narrador trata a Reinhardt como si fuera un genio comparable a grandes figuras de la literatura europea, pero el lector percibe que esa grandeza está construida más por la obsesión de los críticos que por las obras mismas, y en este caso, se va construyendo paso a paso por el narrador, el único punto de vista. La novela se burla suavemente de la idea de que la literatura siempre tenga un significado profundo y se preste a mil interpretaciones, la fascinación por los autores marginales en espera a ser descubiertos, un fenómeno que no tiene mucho que ver con los mismos autores sino con lo que se montan en la cabeza ciertas mentes obsesionadas en descubrir algo de la nada, porque a veces son realmente la nada. El humor soterrado surge del contraste entre la grandeza proclamada y la falta de pruebas.
"Los filósofos han tildado la melancolía de enfermedad, aseguran que es una tristeza sin razón, pero yo estaba convencido de que era la tristeza de la razón. Cuando uno está melancólico ve la realidad con total lucidez."
Para mí el rasgo que mejor identifica las dos novelas de Mark Haber es precisamente ese humor tan particular que se gasta: no es un humor de situaciones cómicas directas, sino más bien obsesivo y ligeramente absurdo, que surge del propio modo en que el narrador piensa y habla. Habla sin parar en un monólogo obsesivo construyéndose un personaje en su mente, Reinhardt, disfrazando de erudición desmesurada lo que pronto seremos conscientes de que realmente poco o nada sabe de él. El narrador analizará cada detalle como si fuera algo trascendental consiguiendo un humor muy sutil, y se podría decir que este humor nace precisamente de lo serio y erudito que se cree, y la ridiculez de su obsesión, porque esa figura adorada realmente podría ser el vacío.
"así que "La Muerte De Iván Ilich" era un completo misterio, apareció con un golpetazo ensordecedor entre la rutinaria pila, y, aunque se parecía a otros libros, lo que contenía dentro le arrqncó el alma ."
En la novela, el protagonista Jacov Reinhardt y su círculo pasan por Rusia y visitan a Tolstói durante sus viajes antes de la expedición a Sudamérica. Haber mezcla personajes históricos reales con personajes inventados. Tolstói aparece como una figura real dentro de ese universo narrativo, mientras que otros nombres que suenan históricos (como ciertos filósofos o psicólogos) son ficticios. Este procedimiento crea una sensación de historia intelectual europea “real”, aunque muchas piezas del rompecabezas estén inventadas. Haber utiliza a Tolstói para algo muy característico de su novela: difumina la frontera entre historia real y ficción y crea un simil imaginario de la melancolía. El lector, como ocurre a menudo en el libro, no siempre sabe qué es histórico y qué es inventado, lo cual forma parte del humor y del estilo del relato.
Me interesa mucho Mark Haber, por un lado, se burla del fenómeno del “genio olvidado”: autores apenas leídos cuya supuesta grandeza son defendidos con fervor por pequeños círculos de estudiosos. Por otro, caricaturiza el estilo de la crítica académica, capaz de inflar infinitamente detalles mínimos. Pero la parodia nunca es cruel. En el fondo el libro expresa un amor genuino por la literatura y por quienes la estudian con pasión. La inocencia erudita del narrador tiene un fondo de afecto y pura melancolía porque se obsesiona por el deseo de salvar a Reinhardt del olvido y a través de este viaje lo que hace es construirse un personaje en su mente que realmente no tiene nada que ver con la realidad. Quizás Mark Haber lo que quiere es sugerir que tal vez Reinhardt no fue tan importante, pero también que el impulso de rescatarlo dice algo esencial de su narrador, y sobre quienes aman los libros. Me encanta Mark Haber.
"y cómo había empezado nuestro vínculo en lo que parecía el.pasado remoto, fábula o sueño todo ello ya, pues ¿qué es el pasado sino un sueño colectivo compartido por los personajes del sueño?"
♫♫♫ Melancholy - Human Tetris ♫♫♫
December 27, 2022
A clever satire about philosophy, dreams, obsessions, the limits of language, peppered with often heartbreaking insight and Krasznahorkai's idiosyncratic style elements that initially detracted from my enjoyment of the book. The smart plot construction recovered whatever was lost in my unfair suspicion that I was dealing with fan fiction.
September 19, 2023
Again, as with Saint Sebastian's Abyss, I began by raising my chariest eyebrow at this shameless Bernhard imitation, but I was again won over—this time by a colorful Wes Anderson-esque cast of characters that Bernhard never would’ve tolerated. My mental image of the book was full of Wes Anderson-style whip pans and deadpan deliveries from the hypochondriac narrator, and the prostitute with the peg leg, and the most prolific dog catcher in Europe (who I always imagined as Willem Dafoe for some reason) and the twins who speak their own private language, etc. Except that I regularly roll my eyes at Wes Anderson (while still enjoying him) but I didn’t roll my eyes at this at all and soon that chary eyebrow had fallen into place and the ocular region of my face simply relaxed and let me read with pleasure.
I read about half of this on a United flight, at the back of the plane, where the fuselage tapers and gives the window-seat passenger about 2/3 of a normal seat. I longed to hang my arm out the window of the plane the entire time, but instead tried to accept with serenity all I could not change, which was, namely, reading this book in a kind of stress position. I’m digging for a metaphor here, about the effect the cramped distorted hysterical mind of Bernhard will have on of those who write in his shadow. I’m not really coming up with anything. But I did think, similar to Saint Sebatian’s Abyss, that Haber was doing some interesting, subtle grappling here, that was attempting to face Bernhard’s writing as a product of extreme melancholy and vitriol and despair, yes, but also, possibly, as a kind of elation.
I read about half of this on a United flight, at the back of the plane, where the fuselage tapers and gives the window-seat passenger about 2/3 of a normal seat. I longed to hang my arm out the window of the plane the entire time, but instead tried to accept with serenity all I could not change, which was, namely, reading this book in a kind of stress position. I’m digging for a metaphor here, about the effect the cramped distorted hysterical mind of Bernhard will have on of those who write in his shadow. I’m not really coming up with anything. But I did think, similar to Saint Sebatian’s Abyss, that Haber was doing some interesting, subtle grappling here, that was attempting to face Bernhard’s writing as a product of extreme melancholy and vitriol and despair, yes, but also, possibly, as a kind of elation.
December 28, 2019
4.5 - really great. It may just be me - I've become super-stingy with that fifth star. In 2020, I hope to become almost as stingy with the third and fourth, but that's not the point of this post.
It would take FAR too much time to explain why this book is worth nearly 5 stars, but it hits some lovely sweet spots for me: funny as the dickens (what does that actually mean, where did it come from? I shall look it up maybe - the etymology of "funny as the dickens"...well, that was easy. It's a euphemism for "as the devil," which doesn't sound as good to me.)
Back on track, yes, it's funny - even though (in another plus) we get the focus of the book: the serious study of melancholy. Anyone who likes their humor dark, like good chocolate, might like this book. Also, there's a great sidekick who actually tells the story of Jacov Reinhardt (whose garden is mentioned in the title.) Reinhardt is a philosopher type who has been afforded the luxury of such depth by being heir to a massive tobacco fortune (picture the death inherent in that phrase: "tobacco fortune".) Reinhardt has ONE interest: melancholy, and his study of it leads him into fantastic conversations, scenes and places. Like most of us who dwell in mentally darker places, his circular journey has its ups and downs and ultimately it goes round and round and round some more. That makes it sound bad, but it is not. Reinhardt's melancholic quest is accompanied by his assistant/our interpreter in many ways, a Croatian man quite prone to hypochondriasis who reminded me of Sancho Panza, but that's probably just me. There is no good reason for that association that I can actually think of now beyond the broadest of strokes. It really is very good. Read it!
It would take FAR too much time to explain why this book is worth nearly 5 stars, but it hits some lovely sweet spots for me: funny as the dickens (what does that actually mean, where did it come from? I shall look it up maybe - the etymology of "funny as the dickens"...well, that was easy. It's a euphemism for "as the devil," which doesn't sound as good to me.)
Back on track, yes, it's funny - even though (in another plus) we get the focus of the book: the serious study of melancholy. Anyone who likes their humor dark, like good chocolate, might like this book. Also, there's a great sidekick who actually tells the story of Jacov Reinhardt (whose garden is mentioned in the title.) Reinhardt is a philosopher type who has been afforded the luxury of such depth by being heir to a massive tobacco fortune (picture the death inherent in that phrase: "tobacco fortune".) Reinhardt has ONE interest: melancholy, and his study of it leads him into fantastic conversations, scenes and places. Like most of us who dwell in mentally darker places, his circular journey has its ups and downs and ultimately it goes round and round and round some more. That makes it sound bad, but it is not. Reinhardt's melancholic quest is accompanied by his assistant/our interpreter in many ways, a Croatian man quite prone to hypochondriasis who reminded me of Sancho Panza, but that's probably just me. There is no good reason for that association that I can actually think of now beyond the broadest of strokes. It really is very good. Read it!
January 18, 2023
Bonkers and brilliant and beautifully written! Mark Haber is a wonder! 🤩
March 10, 2026
Mark Haber’s works have been on my radar for some time now. I finally got to one. I am glad that I did. For 150 pages, I followed our narrator’s musings on his trip with Jacov Reinhardt, the eccentric “intellectual” in search of Emiliano Gomez Carrasquilla in the jungles of South America. The goal? To get to the core of melancholy by discussing it with the master of the topic. I laughed, rolled my eyes, and sighed at Jacov’s vacillations and outbursts. I was equally amused by the narrator’s undying loyalty to a cause… any cause. But I must admit: every other page would have me swimming in my own memories. This is not a bad thing.
I was reminded of a 12-year-old Alan, standing tall and proud in front of the English teacher, arguing for all his worth that Dan Brown’s ‘The Da Vinci Code’ was the best book written in the 21st Century. I remembered his fierce and misdirected loyalty. I fast-forwarded to some years ago, in my office. An undergraduate student telling me that they were picking the path of academia because they were interested in research; that they were going to change the field and thus the world. I saw the fire in their eyes and knew that it could not, perhaps should not, be put out. I knew that it was never about the statistics and the publications and the presentations. I knew that it was their attempt to climb on to the rapidly progressing train of hierarchy and meaning.
I was reminded of a 12-year-old Alan, standing tall and proud in front of the English teacher, arguing for all his worth that Dan Brown’s ‘The Da Vinci Code’ was the best book written in the 21st Century. I remembered his fierce and misdirected loyalty. I fast-forwarded to some years ago, in my office. An undergraduate student telling me that they were picking the path of academia because they were interested in research; that they were going to change the field and thus the world. I saw the fire in their eyes and knew that it could not, perhaps should not, be put out. I knew that it was never about the statistics and the publications and the presentations. I knew that it was their attempt to climb on to the rapidly progressing train of hierarchy and meaning.
May 12, 2025
"And I recalled the most lucid description Jacov had ever given of melancholy: we were strolling through Stuttgart amid the dawning of his gray period, and turning the corner of Kreigsberg onto Ossletzky, Jacov explained that melancholy, in its purest form, was merely the realization of one's own insignificance, and the realization of this insignificance was, in itself, significant, and it was a placid feeling, melancholy was, and feeling of deepest joy hidden, embedded perhaps, inside the havoc of the human heart, and if one understood their own inherent sadness and didn't try to defeat it or drown it or make it their foe in a senseless and ceaseless battle, they might become, dare he say it, civilized and, with a little practice, even enlightened."
"But you see, he added, this insignificance and the realization of this insignificance is wholly pure and honest and unpolluted by the world at large, and hence, in its own small way, is a feeling of such magnitude that one is forever marked. That is melancholy, he'd said, the ailment of artists and visionaries alike, and yes, he said, it hollows a person out, and yes, he said, it is slow and tedious and often feels common, but the humbling that follows is nothing short of miraculous, for if the world were a sadder and more reflective place and people looked inward instead of outward, can you not admit that the world would improve?"
Hernan Diaz is correct when he states in his blurb that melancholy has never felt more euphoric. This is a fun read with great characters and lively prose. I laughed a lot. But it's a thoughtful book as well with a lot to say, as shown by the passages quoted above. Solid four stars.
"But you see, he added, this insignificance and the realization of this insignificance is wholly pure and honest and unpolluted by the world at large, and hence, in its own small way, is a feeling of such magnitude that one is forever marked. That is melancholy, he'd said, the ailment of artists and visionaries alike, and yes, he said, it hollows a person out, and yes, he said, it is slow and tedious and often feels common, but the humbling that follows is nothing short of miraculous, for if the world were a sadder and more reflective place and people looked inward instead of outward, can you not admit that the world would improve?"
Hernan Diaz is correct when he states in his blurb that melancholy has never felt more euphoric. This is a fun read with great characters and lively prose. I laughed a lot. But it's a thoughtful book as well with a lot to say, as shown by the passages quoted above. Solid four stars.
February 10, 2023
Mark Haber is extremely good at writing about awful men who take themselves far too seriously. He puts pompous, dramatic phrases in their mouths and the effect is just hilarious, especially as they mostly utter complete nonsense.
In Reinhardt's Garden the man in question is a Croatian scholar Jakov, an expert on melancholy who embarks on a search of the great lost philosopher of melancholy, the elusive Emiliano Gomez Carrasquilla who is rumoured to reside in the jungles of South America. What follows is a jungle expedition reminiscent of Heart of Darkness alternated with flashbacks about Jakov's years mid-20th century Central Europe.
But the highlights are clearly Jakov's utterances, underlining the same point made in Haber's second novel Saint Sebastian's Abyss that people can build their entire academic or scientific careers, or even their entire lives, on the basis of complete falsehoods or simple misunderstandings.
A great, quick read if you are looking for something easy to read, fun but still thought-provoking.
In Reinhardt's Garden the man in question is a Croatian scholar Jakov, an expert on melancholy who embarks on a search of the great lost philosopher of melancholy, the elusive Emiliano Gomez Carrasquilla who is rumoured to reside in the jungles of South America. What follows is a jungle expedition reminiscent of Heart of Darkness alternated with flashbacks about Jakov's years mid-20th century Central Europe.
But the highlights are clearly Jakov's utterances, underlining the same point made in Haber's second novel Saint Sebastian's Abyss that people can build their entire academic or scientific careers, or even their entire lives, on the basis of complete falsehoods or simple misunderstandings.
A great, quick read if you are looking for something easy to read, fun but still thought-provoking.
October 5, 2019
Brew up a pot of coffee (or find a stash of cocaine) and settle in for this wild ride! There's not a single break in the book - no chapters, no paragraph breaks even - so it's hard to put down once you stop. The whole thing felt like a fever dream.
July 10, 2022
Among the many influences that Reinhardt’s Garden wears on its sleeve, Thomas Bernhard’s comes across the clearest—at least to me, since I haven't read Mila Menendez Krause, whom Haber credits as a significant influence on the work—to the point where it felt, at times, like Haber was acting as a kind of Thomas Bernhard tribute act: The recursive storytelling and frequent use of repetition ("Their impeccable patience, Ulrich would later insist, their unflappable patience, he later remarked, their practice of patience that isn’t merely for observation or curiosity…”); the long, winding, multi-clause sentences (“I can’t wait for the moment we cross the border, because the soil of no other country is as ugly or sickly or petulant as Croatian soil; you can tell simply by looking at the ground how repellant it is, he muttered, and the moment we enter Austria, I will get off this carriage and kiss the Austrian soil, which is no different from…” and so on); an observer narrator obsessed with another character, in this case Jacov, the highly eccentric heir to the Reinhardt Tobacco fortune; the existence of an obsessive academic-ish study (Jacov is conducting a study on the subject of melancholy); the narrator extensively quoting other characters as they narrate their own tales, punctuating their speech not with quotation marks but with frequent use of "so-and-so said”; the narrator also shifting back and forth between quoting other characters' first-person narrations and giving his own account, in the third person, of the story they were telling; the narrator frequently undermining what he just said (“and then he laughed the sweetest, most innocent laugh I’d ever heard, although, to be honest, it also sounded like the gravest and most vulgar laugh I had ever heard”); and, finally, the relentless misery (Jacov’s study is about melancholy, after all).
He doesn’t do a bad job. He exhibits a tremendous amount of skill and imagination. But it did all feel very affected to me. I would rather read Bernhard.
He doesn’t do a bad job. He exhibits a tremendous amount of skill and imagination. But it did all feel very affected to me. I would rather read Bernhard.
Read
November 14, 2023A ridiculously funny book with some great writing tics, if you’re into that sort of thing. Written in a continuous scroll, it’s still highly readable.
“I’ll write this in one continuous scroll, but make it highly readable,” I can imagine him saying, and subsequently writing.
Upon finishing, I could swear that I felt a little melancholic—not quite sad, not quite depressed—a little glimpse of the sublime-as-ephemeral as the that on the basis of which.
After reading, I fell deep into contemplation, so deep, so subterranean, that I correctly intuited Haber’s text to mean both what he had expressed directly as well as the exact opposite of what he had written.
“I’ll write this in one continuous scroll, but make it highly readable,” I can imagine him saying, and subsequently writing.
Upon finishing, I could swear that I felt a little melancholic—not quite sad, not quite depressed—a little glimpse of the sublime-as-ephemeral as the that on the basis of which.
After reading, I fell deep into contemplation, so deep, so subterranean, that I correctly intuited Haber’s text to mean both what he had expressed directly as well as the exact opposite of what he had written.
February 5, 2021
"Heart of Darkness" meets Bernhard's "Correction"
April 7, 2022
Por la portada me esperaba encontrar una novela de aventuras exóticas. Era lo que me apetecía ahora. Y no. “El jardín de Reinhardt” es un libro que tendría su lugar natural en el catálogo de la editorial Pálido Fuego. Literatura contemporánea de vanguardia, vamos.
La historia empieza en 1907 en la selva en algún lugar entre Argentina y Uruguay, donde Jacov Reinhardt está buscando a un filósofo retirado para completar su tratado sobre la melancolía. El narrador es el secretario de Reinhardt y a lo largo de la novela va desgranando su historia hasta ese momento.
A pesar de que Mark Haber es norteamericano, me ha parecido muy influenciado por escritores en lengua española como Bolaño, Aira o el Vila-Matas de “El mal de Montano” o “Doctor Pasavento”. O sea que para mí muy bien. A su manera excéntrica es una novela bastante divertida, que aporta reflexiones interesantes sobre la melancolía y que no cuesta demasiado de leer, enseguida te adaptas a esas frases párrafo berhardianas.
Pero la portada me sigue pareciendo engañosa. Por algo parecido a esto en el Festival de Jazz de Sigüenza llamaron a la Guardia Civil.
La historia empieza en 1907 en la selva en algún lugar entre Argentina y Uruguay, donde Jacov Reinhardt está buscando a un filósofo retirado para completar su tratado sobre la melancolía. El narrador es el secretario de Reinhardt y a lo largo de la novela va desgranando su historia hasta ese momento.
A pesar de que Mark Haber es norteamericano, me ha parecido muy influenciado por escritores en lengua española como Bolaño, Aira o el Vila-Matas de “El mal de Montano” o “Doctor Pasavento”. O sea que para mí muy bien. A su manera excéntrica es una novela bastante divertida, que aporta reflexiones interesantes sobre la melancolía y que no cuesta demasiado de leer, enseguida te adaptas a esas frases párrafo berhardianas.
Pero la portada me sigue pareciendo engañosa. Por algo parecido a esto en el Festival de Jazz de Sigüenza llamaron a la Guardia Civil.
September 6, 2023
“…e così un’Europa del nuovo secolo in cui tutto era possibile, in cui uomini e donne sarebbero giunti a conoscere la compassione e la comprensione e l’empatia grazie alla stanchezza terrena della malinconia, quelle cupe malinconie viennesi e quelle opulente malinconie ungheresi e quelle aride malinconie tedesche cariche di presagi, per non parlare di quelle austere malinconie ebraiche, che l’Europa aveva abbracciato tutte nell’immensità del suo cuore, perché la malinconia era l’emozione della compassione e della riflessione, la malinconia conteneva semplicemente il meglio in ognuno di noi, e mi immaginavo così un secolo di pace e di comprensione…”
bellissimo, da leggere.
bellissimo, da leggere.
December 3, 2021
Written as one unending paragraph, Reinhardt’s Garden follows Jacov Reinhardt in his quest for the essence of melancholy and it’s prophet, Emiliano Gomez Carasquillo. Reinhardt and his scribe travel across Uruguay in 1907 in search of the prophet on a doomed expedition (think Conrad or Alexander Von Humboldt).
At times unrelenting and full of black humour, the book fees like a gift, Haber’s gift to the 21st century as he casts his gaze back at the European melancholics of the 19th century who had high hopes for humanity. Reinhardt is an unlikeable, coke-addled lunatic whose ideals for humanity are deeply flawed.
Haber is writing in the same vein as Roberto Bolano and Laszlo Krasznahorkai, using the art of the rant to take pot shots at academics, philosophers and writers alike. But it is also a homage and a love letter to such thinkers, however flawed and dangerous their ideas may have been. Voice is the engine of the narrative here, not morality.
Haber effectively builds castles in the air, constructing a wonderful plot nested within the rant, including beautiful scenes of idyllic castles in Germany. I can’t recommend this enough. A brilliant debut novel laced with irony in what feels like a homage to the great European writers of the previous century.
“Melancholy was merely the realization of ones own insignificance, and the realization of this insignificance, was in itself, significant, and it was a placid feeling, melancholy was, a feeling of deepest joy hidden, embedded perhaps, inside the havoc of the human heart, and if one understood their inherent sadness and didn’t try to defeat it or drown it in a ceaseless and senseless battle, they might become civilized, and with a little practice, even enlightened.”
At times unrelenting and full of black humour, the book fees like a gift, Haber’s gift to the 21st century as he casts his gaze back at the European melancholics of the 19th century who had high hopes for humanity. Reinhardt is an unlikeable, coke-addled lunatic whose ideals for humanity are deeply flawed.
Haber is writing in the same vein as Roberto Bolano and Laszlo Krasznahorkai, using the art of the rant to take pot shots at academics, philosophers and writers alike. But it is also a homage and a love letter to such thinkers, however flawed and dangerous their ideas may have been. Voice is the engine of the narrative here, not morality.
Haber effectively builds castles in the air, constructing a wonderful plot nested within the rant, including beautiful scenes of idyllic castles in Germany. I can’t recommend this enough. A brilliant debut novel laced with irony in what feels like a homage to the great European writers of the previous century.
“Melancholy was merely the realization of ones own insignificance, and the realization of this insignificance, was in itself, significant, and it was a placid feeling, melancholy was, a feeling of deepest joy hidden, embedded perhaps, inside the havoc of the human heart, and if one understood their inherent sadness and didn’t try to defeat it or drown it in a ceaseless and senseless battle, they might become civilized, and with a little practice, even enlightened.”
September 8, 2023
Un viaggio nella giungla sudamericana alla ricerca del reale significato della malinconia.
Gli elementi per apprezzarlo ci sono tutti, ed in effetti il libro si legge che è un piacere.
Non mi ha lasciato quel quid che ti fa dire “memorabile”, eppure la forma del flusso di coscienza unico - alla Bernhard per intenderci - è padroneggiata bene dall’autore e risulta molto scorrevole.
Gli elementi per apprezzarlo ci sono tutti, ed in effetti il libro si legge che è un piacere.
Non mi ha lasciato quel quid che ti fa dire “memorabile”, eppure la forma del flusso di coscienza unico - alla Bernhard per intenderci - è padroneggiata bene dall’autore e risulta molto scorrevole.
February 9, 2025
A remarkable read. Breathless, sinewy, propulsive sentences. A quixotic romp through European melancholia in turn of the century South America. In the tradition of Bolaño’s AMULET, Herrera’s SEASON OF THE SWAMP and Enrigue’s SUDDEN DEATH. Haber’s debut reads as if written by a master stylist, his confidence with language and voice is apparent in every phrase and clause.
April 22, 2019
“One doesn’t study happiness and joy and contentment at the DAWN of one’s intellectual career, for happiness and joy and contentment are the DESTINATION of one’s intellectual career, and not until one has traveled the dark and menacing paths of pathos, the bramble-infested corridors of anguish, does one learn that HAPPINESS and MELANCHOLY are two words for the same thing.”
October 26, 2019
Enjoyably out of the strain of fiction we see in English these days. Told in one swirling monologue. Full of bile and sarcasm, there was a lot to like here, but with all that in mind it felt a bit repetitive at times, in not an always appealing way. And I felt as if it never quite cohered to something in the way I'd hope it would, but maybe that's the point.
October 10, 2019
Obsessive, reeling, funny as hell. Bernhard in the jungle.
November 15, 2019
A Heart of Darkness journey into the darkness of the heart. If you're into Thomas Bernhard, Krasznahorkai and, dare I say, Beckett, you'll totally dig this dense, challenging little novel.
April 1, 2024
Swayed by his charismatic intellectual mentor [Jacov Reinhardt], the hypochondriac narrator of this tale follows Jacov into the Uruguayan jungle, in search of a mystical and wise prophet of melancholy.
I was sold by the description of this tale, and by the fact that comparisons were made, on the back, to Thomas Bernhard, Roberto Bolaño and Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo.
The Bernhard influence is the most prevalent, in fact, it is obvious; spiteful intellectual character in manic pursuit, digressive syntax, and frequent locutionary framing; as in the many uses of "he said and I wrote" when relaying conversations within a tale-telling setup.
Very little actually happens in the story's real-time. Most is told in remembrances from the author, and almost all of it is focused on Jacov's maddening obsession with melancholy, a topic, the only topic, that he, Jacov, spends all his mental faculties on, and the reason behind the trip to Uruguay, having earlier brought the party to Germany, Hungary and Lev Tolstoy's mansion in Russia.
Jacov is a fun character; completely deluded by his belief in his own genius, and obsessively convinced he can burrow into the depths of melancholy, and find something valuable to the world, and himself. He is deluded to the point where he, not only misreads, but completely inverts the philosophical works of a so-called "melancholic prophet", to fit his own needs [the actual text is not about melancholy, but about finding happiness, but Jacov translates it to be about his own favorite topic instead]. That was quite funny, and the narrator's hopelessly misguided optimism at the end was also worth a chuckle.
However, the book lacked heart to me. The characters were fun caricatures, but not engaging as people. It is a sort of satire of crazed intellectual ambition and self-delusion, which is a theme that feels archaic, like the 20th-century European writing style that Mark Haber imitates.
I have no issue with choosing to write a book in this style, and the style was well done, the text was well written as a single paragraph without typographic denotations between interlocutors, which is hard to do right.
But the lack of any emotion or "realness", and the feeling that the book doesn't want to get at something; a lack of intent or purpose, leaves it as a fun, well-written book, with a bit of a hollow center.
I was sold by the description of this tale, and by the fact that comparisons were made, on the back, to Thomas Bernhard, Roberto Bolaño and Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo.
The Bernhard influence is the most prevalent, in fact, it is obvious; spiteful intellectual character in manic pursuit, digressive syntax, and frequent locutionary framing; as in the many uses of "he said and I wrote" when relaying conversations within a tale-telling setup.
Very little actually happens in the story's real-time. Most is told in remembrances from the author, and almost all of it is focused on Jacov's maddening obsession with melancholy, a topic, the only topic, that he, Jacov, spends all his mental faculties on, and the reason behind the trip to Uruguay, having earlier brought the party to Germany, Hungary and Lev Tolstoy's mansion in Russia.
Jacov is a fun character; completely deluded by his belief in his own genius, and obsessively convinced he can burrow into the depths of melancholy, and find something valuable to the world, and himself. He is deluded to the point where he, not only misreads, but completely inverts the philosophical works of a so-called "melancholic prophet", to fit his own needs [the actual text is not about melancholy, but about finding happiness, but Jacov translates it to be about his own favorite topic instead]. That was quite funny, and the narrator's hopelessly misguided optimism at the end was also worth a chuckle.
However, the book lacked heart to me. The characters were fun caricatures, but not engaging as people. It is a sort of satire of crazed intellectual ambition and self-delusion, which is a theme that feels archaic, like the 20th-century European writing style that Mark Haber imitates.
I have no issue with choosing to write a book in this style, and the style was well done, the text was well written as a single paragraph without typographic denotations between interlocutors, which is hard to do right.
But the lack of any emotion or "realness", and the feeling that the book doesn't want to get at something; a lack of intent or purpose, leaves it as a fun, well-written book, with a bit of a hollow center.
April 29, 2025
4.5 ⭐
Este é um livro que não vai agradar as todos. Escrito em um único parágrafo, é como um monólogo febril mesclando longas e elaboradas frases num fluxo contínuo de pensamentos que desafia as regras convencionais da literatura e nos cativa com sua intensidade e originalidade.
A narrativa é extremamente cativante, a melancolia é algo me atrai bastante e essa jornada em busca de Emiliano Gomez Carrasquilla, um filósofo colombiano que escreveu sobre a melancolia pelas selvas. Foi uma leitura que me encantou bastante e me deixou bem reflexivo.
Este é um livro que não vai agradar as todos. Escrito em um único parágrafo, é como um monólogo febril mesclando longas e elaboradas frases num fluxo contínuo de pensamentos que desafia as regras convencionais da literatura e nos cativa com sua intensidade e originalidade.
A narrativa é extremamente cativante, a melancolia é algo me atrai bastante e essa jornada em busca de Emiliano Gomez Carrasquilla, um filósofo colombiano que escreveu sobre a melancolia pelas selvas. Foi uma leitura que me encantou bastante e me deixou bem reflexivo.
May 29, 2024
Sonja enjoyed nothing more than entertaining young Stuttgarters, to awaken their most carnal desires, and I often saw these lovers afterward, lost in the intricate wings of the second Stuttgart castle and looking for an exit, and I did my best to guide them out, young virile men sheathed in sweat, pupils engorged, and I didn't know what they did with Sonja but I could've imagined, just as I imagined Jacov in the various positions a man of such beauty held in repose or perhaps in copulation or, if I imagined harder, climbing a tree, for why not, why couldn't Jacov don a pair of breeches and take an excursion, allowing the sun to envelop his doughy thighs and pale shins as he grasped the lowest branches of, say, a pine or a beech or a spruce sapling, lifting himself, grunting, off the ground? [102]
July 16, 2020
Reinhardt's Garden - Mark Haber
A story of a madman or genius (probably both) Jacov in search of the ''essence of melancholy''. This shorter story (tough its page count does not reflect it well at all) is located in the South American jungles, but with many flashbacks to earlier life in Europe. The cast, one legged Sonia, headhunterish Ulrich, Jacov, and the hypochondriac narrator. Trying to finally complete his book on melancholy Jacov sets out too find the forgotten mastermind that is Emiliano Gomez Carrasquilla, who he describes as being the only person who fully understands melancholy!
If I have to put a genre on Reinhardt's Garden I would say it's a dark comedy, philosophical adventure. The setting (the world pre ww1) reminded me of Zweig, more precisely the Wes Andersson film Grand Budapest Hotel (based on Zweigs works) in its bizarreness, but also because it manages to not only be bizarre in a genius way but also give off a very very immersing feel and environment. However, one thing that really impressed me is how close the book managed to get to total bizarreness, Haber manages to never take it overboard just for effect, I could still take the cast seriously (kinda) however strange and eccentric they were.
It is is a vivid book with great characters, a thought out well balanced plot. And absolutely hilarious. For example the pure hilariousness of Jacovs obsession of dust and insistence not destroy it but to collect it, which seems mad, but after he explains his theory it actually becomes sober and I wondered, if only the word ''dust'' (which most people are appalled by) would have been changed to something else lets say for example gathering leaves, it would not come across as mad at all. Jacovs descriptions and rants are what carries the novel, the reader never knows what rant or thought will come out of his strange mind.
The only thing that annoyed me was Habers description of Jacov (implying the likeness of a ginger clown) totally clashed with my imagination of him as a bone faced dark haired skeletony man. And it that is my biggest problem with the book, then its damed good...
Another reviewer compared the book to a fever dream, I could not agree more, that is exactly the feeling I had, read it on one day, which is something very rare, and as its format does not consists of any chapters I think that is the best way to read this madly hilarious, unique, immersive and strangely genius novel.
A story of a madman or genius (probably both) Jacov in search of the ''essence of melancholy''. This shorter story (tough its page count does not reflect it well at all) is located in the South American jungles, but with many flashbacks to earlier life in Europe. The cast, one legged Sonia, headhunterish Ulrich, Jacov, and the hypochondriac narrator. Trying to finally complete his book on melancholy Jacov sets out too find the forgotten mastermind that is Emiliano Gomez Carrasquilla, who he describes as being the only person who fully understands melancholy!
If I have to put a genre on Reinhardt's Garden I would say it's a dark comedy, philosophical adventure. The setting (the world pre ww1) reminded me of Zweig, more precisely the Wes Andersson film Grand Budapest Hotel (based on Zweigs works) in its bizarreness, but also because it manages to not only be bizarre in a genius way but also give off a very very immersing feel and environment. However, one thing that really impressed me is how close the book managed to get to total bizarreness, Haber manages to never take it overboard just for effect, I could still take the cast seriously (kinda) however strange and eccentric they were.
It is is a vivid book with great characters, a thought out well balanced plot. And absolutely hilarious. For example the pure hilariousness of Jacovs obsession of dust and insistence not destroy it but to collect it, which seems mad, but after he explains his theory it actually becomes sober and I wondered, if only the word ''dust'' (which most people are appalled by) would have been changed to something else lets say for example gathering leaves, it would not come across as mad at all. Jacovs descriptions and rants are what carries the novel, the reader never knows what rant or thought will come out of his strange mind.
The only thing that annoyed me was Habers description of Jacov (implying the likeness of a ginger clown) totally clashed with my imagination of him as a bone faced dark haired skeletony man. And it that is my biggest problem with the book, then its damed good...
Another reviewer compared the book to a fever dream, I could not agree more, that is exactly the feeling I had, read it on one day, which is something very rare, and as its format does not consists of any chapters I think that is the best way to read this madly hilarious, unique, immersive and strangely genius novel.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 110 reviews