It’s the Poor …

Malcolm Bull

  • The Ruin of Kasch by Roberto Calasso, translated by William Weaver and Stephen Sartarelli
    Carcanet, 385 pp, £19.95, November 1994, ISBN 0 85635 713 8

Roberto Calasso is an Italian publisher who writes erudite works of non-fiction so elegantly self-indulgent they can be marketed as novels. He is working on a trilogy, or perhaps tetralogy, of which The Ruin of Kasch is the first part, and The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (which preceded it in English translation) the second. According to the author, the former deals with history, the latter with myth. But whereas The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony was a delightful recreation of the lost art of mythography, The Ruin of Kasch does nothing comparable for historiography, and isn’t really about history at all.

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