An Interview with Mark Haber

“Absurdity is great because it’s a mirror; the whole structure of our world, if one simply steps back and observes, they’ll see it: we wake up, we make coffee, we dress the kids and go to the same office every day to do things that equal numbers, which equal, two weeks later, money. Yes, it makes sense, but it’s also terribly absurd. Everything is absurd with the right spin.”

Formidable writers who don’t exist:
Luswage Amini
Wadi Assad
de Selby
Pierre Menard
Mila Menendez Krause
Ern Malley

I first encountered Mark Haber as a bookseller; that is, as a reader. His championing of writers outside the mainstream, in particular contemporary Latin American writers, has put a productive dent in my sense of what is happening in world literature, and this was reason enough for me to expect that his own first novel, Reinhardt’s Garden, would offer something new. Originality was the one expectation I went in with. But Haber’s relationship to originality turns out to be quite complicated, and this complication ended up being one of my favorite things his novel has to offer.

Told in a single, leisurely, narrative paragraph, Reinhardt’s Garden is a comic account of autodidactic tobacco heir Jacov Reinhardt, as told by his hypochondriac sidekick. An erratic figure of monumental pretension, Reinhardt has dedicated his life to the study of melancholy, and this intellectual quest takes him on a journey through Europe, Russia, and eventually to the Amazon. It is hard to tell whether the physical events of this journey or its philosophical underpinnings are more ridiculous, though Haber keeps a straight face throughout, and this heroically sustained irony pushes the reader into questions—of realness and fakeness, tradition and invention—some of which I wanted to ask him. 

—Martin Riker

THE BELIEVER: I’ll start with a snarky opinion I used to hold. It began years ago when I read William Gaddis’s Agape Agape and was disappointed to see that one of our great stylistic innovators had written a book “in the style of” Thomas Bernhard. Later other books started appearing “in the style of” Bernhard, books by writers as diverse as Laszlo Krasznahorkai and Horacio Castellanos Moya—in fact a large chunk of the New Directions catalog—and then even newer voices, such as the Australian writer Jen Craig. Eventually I came to realize that what I had been thinking of restrictively as a style was in fact a genre—or tradition—a way of writing but also a way of thinking. And while writing out of someone else’s style risks being derivative, working within a genre is simply choosing which conversation to join.

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