Reinhardt's Garden

August 1, 2019
A wealthy eccentric travels through Europe and South America hunting for the nature of melancholy. Haber's debut novel (Deathbed Conversions: Stories, 2008) concerns Jacov Reinhardt, a Croatian-born heir to a tobacco fortune who has a bottomless appetite for cocaine and an intense compulsion to understand "that most elusive of emotions: melancholy, not a feeling but a mood, not a color but a shade...an enigmatic realm." Is Jacov on a valid intellectual pursuit or a cokehead's crackpot adventure? Like the mood itself, the novel stakes a kind of middle ground, but that's an asset: The story is contemplative yet open to absurdity. The book opens in 1907 in the jungle outside of Montevideo, Uruguay, where Jacov and his assistants (including the narrator) are hunting for a scholar of melancholy who reputedly lives in the region. But the narrator soon leaps into the past, recalling his 11-year relationship with Jacov, encompassing Jacov's experiences of losing his twin sister at 9 years old, a stint in a sanitarium, a detour into Stuttgart (where he constructed a castle "that evokes the unfulfilled longing of life"), and a trip to Russia to, basically, stalk Leo Tolstoy. With a philosophical bent and nary a paragraph break, the novel evokes Gertrude Stein, contemporary European and South American writers like Matthias Énard, Roberto Bolaño, and César Aira, with the Quixotic atmosphere of Werner Herzog films like Fitzcarraldo. Regardless of influence, it's broad-minded, intellectual stuff but not oppressively so; the story is rich with stemwinders on the intersection of melancholy with lust, religion, debauchery, and more. Is Jacov mad? At least a little, especially once the truth about that scholar of melancholy becomes clear. But in form and language, his story entertainingly evokes the mood it's chasing: interior, mercurial, implacable. A strange but lavishly imagined tale of a hard-to-describe feeling.

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August 5, 2019
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.

September 1, 2019

Jacov Reinhardt, Croatian heir to a tobacco fortune, is obsessed to the point of insanity with the idea of melancholy as the deepest and most profound of human emotions. Driven by the trauma of his beloved twin sister's death in childhood, he dedicates his life to a massive and, he hopes, world-changing revelation on the essence of melancholy. His years of study have led him to revere an obscure cleric, Emiliano Gomez Carrasquilla, whose writings he has inexplicably inverted into a coded treatise on melancholy. Carrasquilla is rumored to have sequestered himself deep in the South American jungle, so Jacov sets off with his loyal assistant (and the novel's narrator) on an implausible and ill-equipped quest to find "the lost philosopher of melancholy." VERDICT Subverting the conventions of the late 19th-early 20th century novel of the obsessed European venturing into the jungle, Haber (Deathbed Conversions) has crafted a knowing (and perhaps at times too knowing) parody of the genre. Combine its brevity with its main character's mania and almost religious elevation of melancholy, and the book might best be described as Heart of Darkness viewed in a fun house mirror.--Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2019
A wealthy eccentric travels through Europe and South America hunting for the nature of melancholy. Haber's debut novel (Deathbed Conversions: Stories, 2008) concerns Jacov Reinhardt, a Croatian-born heir to a tobacco fortune who has a bottomless appetite for cocaine and an intense compulsion to understand "that most elusive of emotions: melancholy, not a feeling but a mood, not a color but a shade...an enigmatic realm." Is Jacov on a valid intellectual pursuit or a cokehead's crackpot adventure? Like the mood itself, the novel stakes a kind of middle ground, but that's an asset: The story is contemplative yet open to absurdity. The book opens in 1907 in the jungle outside of Montevideo, Uruguay, where Jacov and his assistants (including the narrator) are hunting for a scholar of melancholy who reputedly lives in the region. But the narrator soon leaps into the past, recalling his 11-year relationship with Jacov, encompassing Jacov's experiences of losing his twin sister at 9 years old, a stint in a sanitarium, a detour into Stuttgart (where he constructed a castle "that evokes the unfulfilled longing of life"), and a trip to Russia to, basically, stalk Leo Tolstoy. With a philosophical bent and nary a paragraph break, the novel evokes Gertrude Stein, contemporary European and South American writers like Matthias �nard, Roberto Bola�o, and C�sar Aira, with the Quixotic atmosphere of Werner Herzog films like Fitzcarraldo. Regardless of influence, it's broad-minded, intellectual stuff but not oppressively so; the story is rich with stemwinders on the intersection of melancholy with lust, religion, debauchery, and more. Is Jacov mad? At least a little, especially once the truth about that scholar of melancholy becomes clear. But in form and language, his story entertainingly evokes the mood it's chasing: interior, mercurial, implacable. A strange but lavishly imagined tale of a hard-to-describe feeling.

COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.