What to Do After You Say "I Do": The booklet of All Books â€” Roberto Calassoâ€™s paean to biblical fantasy

The novelist Sebastian Faulks once remarked that "of the a hundred most useful stories ever informed, ninety nine are likely in the old testament and the different is in Homer." Roberto Calasso would have disagreed with his proportions and his omission of Hindu literature — but he would, no doubt, have agreed with the underlying sentiment. The Hebrew Bible positively chokes with pithy, penetrating and profound studies, from Eden to Exodus, exile to eternity.

Calasso, who died earlier this year, became a grasp of fantasy. Fluent in four modern and three ancient languages, he wrote a (very free) series of books, the highest quality-familiar of which is the marriage of Cadmus and harmony, exploring the pathways between modernity, European literature and historical experiences. The booklet of All Books, his final booklet (for now — different posthumous works stay to be posted), tackles perhaps the most reliable "fable" of European civilisation: the Bible.

delusion is a notoriously slippery observe. For some, it skill comfortably "false belief". For others, like Calasso, it's a controlling story, an impressive narrative that evokes and constructions the complexity of human existence. traditionally, this form of myth could be extra or much less genuine; the question doesn't in fact pastime Calasso. Existentially, it discloses truths about who we are.

Calasso connects the studies of the ancient world with European pondering as Kafka, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Freud flit across his pages

Calasso's title refers now not handiest to the fact that the Bible is not a booklet however a set, but additionally, more chiefly, to an idea of Goethe's that serves as his epigraph. "The e-book of all books", Goethe wrote, "became given to us that we might are trying to enter there as into a 2d world, the place we lose ourselves, enlighten ourselves, ideal ourselves."

This captures what Calasso makes an attempt. starting with the early kings of Israel, he then loops returned to Abraham, Moses and the introduction, earlier than returning to the destruction of the Temple and the arriving of the Messiah. He writes engagingly, briefly, direct sentences and discrete paragraphs, that are rendered clearly into English by way of Tim Parks. And he is trustworthy to his supply material, often supplementing it with details from the Mishnah, the publish-biblical Jewish way of life, and from his personal pen.

These are not easy retellings, however. Calasso isn't conveniently translating the old testomony afresh — wisely, due to the fact that Robert Alter has finished such a good job of that these days in a series of books, together with The 5 Books of Moses and The David Story. nor is he providing a commentary, however he does draw on some (not very fresh) biblical scholarship.

somewhat, he's connecting: connecting the experiences of Israel with these of classical Greece and Vedic India; with moments of European literature and philosophy, as Kafka, Weil, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche flit throughout his pages; and with the deep currents of human existence. Freud, himself interested by story of Moses, gets an entire chapter, and all over the ebook Calasso links the stories with reflections on sacrifice, election, evil, separation and redemption — losing, enlightening and perfecting himself within the process.

The Hebrew Bible, he intimates, offers us some thing that modernity fails to. The "secular world laptop", he writes at one point, is like a corporation that rewards efficient employees and assigns the others greater depressing jobs. The "scientific world desktop", by contrast, favours those that have briefly avoided evil's blows "merely because of statistical chance".

however these two aren't enough to explain the world by which we are living, one which witnesses the sort of "grace" that is given to Abraham and "dis-grace" it really is felt by way of Job. For that, Calasso writes, we ought to turn to the Bible.

The e-book of All Books by means of Roberto Calasso, translated through Tim Parks, Allen Lane £25, 464 pages

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