History & Criticism
![Mark Haber - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B07Y6QH2ZB.jpg)
Saint Sebastian's Abyss
"What I wanted more than anything was to be standing beside Schmidt, in concert with Schmidt, at the foot of Saint Sebastian's Abyss along with Schmidt, hands cupped to the sides of our faces, debating art, transcendence, and the glory of the apocalypse."
Former best friends who built their careers writing about a single work of art meet after a decades-long falling-out. One of them, called to the other's deathbed for unknown reasons by a "relatively short" nine-page email, spends his flight to Berlin reflecting on Dutch Renaissance painter Count Hugo Beckenbauer and his masterpiece, Saint Sebastian's Abyss, the work that established both men as important art critics and also destroyed their relationship. A darkly comic meditation on art, obsession, and the enigmatic power of friendship, Saint Sebastian's Abyss stalks the museum halls of Europe, feverishly seeking salvation, annihilation, and the meaning of belief.
Former best friends who built their careers writing about a single work of art meet after a decades-long falling-out. One of them, called to the other's deathbed for unknown reasons by a "relatively short" nine-page email, spends his flight to Berlin reflecting on Dutch Renaissance painter Count Hugo Beckenbauer and his masterpiece, Saint Sebastian's Abyss, the work that established both men as important art critics and also destroyed their relationship. A darkly comic meditation on art, obsession, and the enigmatic power of friendship, Saint Sebastian's Abyss stalks the museum halls of Europe, feverishly seeking salvation, annihilation, and the meaning of belief.
Editorial Reviews
"[Saint Sebastian's Abyss] poses huge questions that tax the heart as much as the brain. . . . Haber's slim volume quietly contemplates a possible distinction of art and not-art, as well as the nature of authority and of elitism. Taut as a drum, it also calls to mind the early novellas of Roberto Bolaño and reads, at times, like an outtake from William Gaddis's The Recognitions." -Andrew Ervin, The Brooklyn Rail
"A delightful and dizzying excursion into the relationship between art and criticism, and all the ways that we often deceive ourselves about the things and people we love. Concise and deftly rendered, it moves forward like a rocket-or more accurately, like the transatlantic flight his unnamed American narrator takes to visit his friend and nemesis Schmidt in Berlin. . . . In each of their lives, the painting has become a kind of mirror, reflecting their ideas and their assertions back upon themselves." -David L. Ulin, Alta Journal
"Haber writes in a deliberately hyperbolic literary style that is a lot of fun, provided you're the type of person who has a sense of humor about your own pretensions. His work reads like it has been translated from a Balkan language by an unfunny academic, which makes it, paradoxically, utterly engaging. This, Haber's second novel, takes on art, professional rivalry, and male friendship. It is an all-too-brief delight!" -Ed Nowatka,Publishers Weekly
"[A] careful, fuguelike intellectual satire. . . . Haber deliberately withholds details about the painting itself-we know there's a donkey, a cliffside, rays of light, and apostles, but not enough to sense why [his characters] are so thunderstruck. And in a way, they hardly seem to know themselves. . . . A darkly funny novel about the wages of small-stakes intellectual combat." -Kirkus
"Saint Sebastian's Abyss feels exactly like the description of the painting-deceitfully small in scale, containing a cosmic abyss at its center. The mimetic impulse between the book and its themes pervades the whole reading experience. Aesthetic value, history, institutions, criticism, authorship, material conditions-these are only some of the terms...
"A delightful and dizzying excursion into the relationship between art and criticism, and all the ways that we often deceive ourselves about the things and people we love. Concise and deftly rendered, it moves forward like a rocket-or more accurately, like the transatlantic flight his unnamed American narrator takes to visit his friend and nemesis Schmidt in Berlin. . . . In each of their lives, the painting has become a kind of mirror, reflecting their ideas and their assertions back upon themselves." -David L. Ulin, Alta Journal
"Haber writes in a deliberately hyperbolic literary style that is a lot of fun, provided you're the type of person who has a sense of humor about your own pretensions. His work reads like it has been translated from a Balkan language by an unfunny academic, which makes it, paradoxically, utterly engaging. This, Haber's second novel, takes on art, professional rivalry, and male friendship. It is an all-too-brief delight!" -Ed Nowatka,Publishers Weekly
"[A] careful, fuguelike intellectual satire. . . . Haber deliberately withholds details about the painting itself-we know there's a donkey, a cliffside, rays of light, and apostles, but not enough to sense why [his characters] are so thunderstruck. And in a way, they hardly seem to know themselves. . . . A darkly funny novel about the wages of small-stakes intellectual combat." -Kirkus
"Saint Sebastian's Abyss feels exactly like the description of the painting-deceitfully small in scale, containing a cosmic abyss at its center. The mimetic impulse between the book and its themes pervades the whole reading experience. Aesthetic value, history, institutions, criticism, authorship, material conditions-these are only some of the terms...
