Reinhardt's Garden by Mark Haber (2019)

"Philosophers have labeled melancholy a disease, claimed it is sadness without reason, yet I was certain it was the sadness of reason. When one is melancholic, one sees reality with complete lucidity. Melancholics are the blessed of this world, the seers and visionaries, and as Jacov spoke of his melancholy he became less melancholic, because, to study this emotion, I realized one had to leave it behind, for melancholy drains the strength, saps the spirit, erodes the aptitude, and one of melancholy's cruelest ironies is the strength required for it to be studied."

Melancholy is a terrible blessing that is not without its own mania. Reinhardt's Garden captures an extension of melancholy's trajectory through three main characters, Jacov, the narrator, and Sonja. For all their pathetic observations (pathetic because there is nothing to be done), their inquiry holds true and even illuminating within the bitter blackness of crumbling estates (the Reinhardt Estate), the constant manual labor of the estate employees (who sell tobacco), and the imbecility of the locals.

"There is no end to Reinhardt tobacco money, he boasted, which arrives incessantly and in untold and infinite amounts in can't begin to comprehend because there's so much of it, too much to really count, which, regardless, is the banker's job and not mine, but I assure you there will be no end, no end, he repeated, to Reinhardt tobacco money, and even when I'm dead people will continue to smoke, and thus Reinhardt tobacco money is eternal and never-ending."

Melancholy starts with humidity and, fittingly, Haber starts there as well (specifically, in the heat of Croatia, sea-blown and dull). The three, the narrator obsessed with Jacov's intellectual phantoms, Jacov and his frustration with the state of a world gone languid (finally resorting to cocaine as an impetus for action), and Sonja, a creaturely, almost feral artist and writer, fall into a kind of slow vortex of thought, nihilism, and intimacy, both sexual and platonic. These three carry the weight of those who find themselves at a social standstill, those who find themselves wanting in the face of a meaningless world. However, they search for satisfaction and contentment within one another, in the books they read, the music they listen to, in companionship, sex, and the conversations they share.

While Reinhardt's Garden leans terribly close to the precipice of sardonicism and mockery, the narrator never falls into that abyss. The work he witnesses, the work he himself does (a scribe of Jacov's meandering and sometimes obnoxious outbursts of philosophical revelation), and his admiration for Sonja's more mysterious and careful thoughts and actions, is convincing in its genuine concern for his companions and their state of being. His desire to find substantial experiences simply by being with them, alongside their pathological prejudices and their hatred for almost everyone and everything outside their inner circle, drives the story home.

"When he wasn't preparing his masterwork, Jacov was circling the grounds, bellowing at the masons, demanding they reach toward God but an unsympathetic God, he implored, a cruel God, he cried, a God, he howled, whose voice was muted by the deafening roar of a moronic humanity."

Between bursts of ridiculous laughter and lovely states of boredom, their self-implored dialectics reach some final crystal clear conclusions: that melancholy, even derived from anger, is pleasant, even comforting, while amid the same old histories of supply and demand, conquerer and conquered - that melancholy has no mask and bears itself not on an image (of a landscape or a people) but on individual souls reaching for a different kind of freedom.

Though Jacov's fidelity to writer/philosopher Emiliano Gomez Carrasquilla (the strong impetus behind his every seemingly profound thought) wavers, both the narrator and Sonja pick up the literal and psychological messes he leaves behind in sad apathy and encourage him to continue to pursue his masterwork in the comprehension of their shared subjective affect of melancholia. And Jacov does. The narrator is enamored by this pursuit, sometimes awestruck by how debilitating it is to their livelihood.

"Are they falling into a black hole? Jacov cursed... but eventually Sonia grew silent, and it was her silence most of all that made us worry, and Jacov attempted to buoy her spirits, encouraging her to hold on to life. Hold on to life, he cried, cling to hope, he shouted... convinced a black hole or, at the very least, another dimension had sealed itself on his estate, for he had studied alternate dimensions and parallel universes... and this had all the hallmarks of a black hole opening... and Sonja's dogged yearning to hold fast to this world was keeping them, clinging, to our dimension."

A difficult but fruitful path, this one. For its wry humor, its disgust with culture's vapidity, and its loyalty to continued friendship, cheers to more days and nights of uncovering the multilayered nuances of melancholy, which, to say the least, refuses to accept the mere appearance of happiness.