The Ruin of Kasch - Hardcover

"The Ruin of Kasch takes up two subjects: the first is Talleyrand, and the second is everything else. And everything else includes all the things that have happened in human history, from the beginnings of civilization until today...A book that loves to reveal itself as wandering and vagrant, guided only by fancy and by an insatiable curiosity, constructed of fragments, citations, digressions, anecdotes, and aphorisms--all so that it can be read with nearly continuous pleasure. The book--like an explosion carrying sky-high the wreckage of a city--is an appropriately chaotic and fast-moving assemblage...One minute, the reader is present at the Congress of Vienna; the next, in Cambodia under the Pol Pot regime. -- Andrea Lee "New Yorker" "The Ruin of Kasch" is not a narrative but an inexhaustible mine of anecdotes, not an essay but an endless string of brilliant insights into literature, history, philosophy, economics, politics--in short, into the makings and unmakings of the modern world. -- Masolino d'Amico "Times Literary Supplement" With "The Ruin of Kasch" Roberto Calasso has perhaps inaugurated a new literary category: the hybrid book, uniting history and novel, tale and aphorism, fable and reflection...One doesn't know what to admire more: the erudition that laughs at erudition, the supple and imperious thinking that connects disparate elements with a single stroke, the masterful way the subject engenders its own form...A very great book. -- Pascal Bruckner "Le Figaro" This is a work charged with intelligence and literary seduction...A master of obliquity, Calasso delights in the bishop's move: his ideas and conceits veer in all directions, striking an exhilarating balance between the aleatory and the deliberate. Profligate in its voices and conversations, this startling, puzzling, profound book yields no take-away thesis; but it lingers in the memory like the aroma of an ancient library. -- Sunil Khilnani "New York Times Book Review" Calasso seems to have plundered no less than a national library to make this demanding but unfailingly provocative book. Its theme...is the shallowness of the modern mind, and because of the very workings of modern culture that Calasso so astutely analyzes, I hesitate to apply to his book the epithet it richly deserves: masterpiece...Like all great books, it reads us more truly than we read it. And like all great works of art or reflection, it may make you change your life. -- Jay Tolson "Civilization" "The Ruin of Kasch" takes up two subjects: the first is Talleyrand, and the second is everything else. And everything else includes all the things that have happened in human history, from the beginnings of civilization until today...A book that loves to reveal itself as wandering and vagrant, guided only by fancy and by an insatiable curiosity, constructed of fragments, citations, digressions, anecdotes, and aphorisms--all so that it can be read with nearly continuous pleasure. -- Italo Calvino "Panorama Mese" Scarcely have readers opened the book when they are not merely interested but fascinated--dazzled in the richest sense of the word...Here is a work that combines erudition, brilliance of style, and intellectual virtuosity to portray the modern era. -- Francois Bott "Le Monde" Philosophical, meandering, allegorical, funny, tragic, episodic, "The Ruin of Kasch" declares war on all ideologies...Those of you who love small, sensible, linear novels--this book will cure you of your shivers and qualms...Long live Calassotherapy! -- Frederic Vitoux "Le Nouvel Observateur" [This is] a work charged with intelligence and literary seduction...A master of obliquity, [Calasso] delights in the bishop's move: his ideas and conceits veer in all directions, striking an exhilarating balance between the aleatory and the deliberate. Profligate in its voices and conversations, this startling, puzzling, profound book yields no take-away thesis; but it lingers in the memory like the aroma of an ancient library. -- Sunil Khilnani "New York Times Book Review"

Taking as his focus the periods immediately before and after the French Revolution but making occasional sallies backward and forward in time - from Vedic India to the porticoes of the Palais-Royal and to the killing fields of Pol Pot - Calasso recounts, elucidates, and interprets the downfall of what Baudelaire was already calling "the Modern." This downfall came as a sequel to an earlier and opposite collapse: that of the archaic societies which were regulated by the movements of the stars and the rituals of sacrifice. At the center of the work stands the story of the ruin of Kasch, a legendary African kingdom whose annihilation becomes emblematic of the ruin of the ancient and modern worlds. The genius of Calasso's book is that, in its illuminating blend of literature and ideas, it establishes a genre all its own. Its form is a rich blend of anecdotes, quotations, analysis, digressions, aphorisms, dialogues, historical discussion, and straightforward storytelling that beautifully mirrors its subject matter and evokes the protean spirit of Modernism. It is a sumptuous literary feast. Calasso brings to his stage a vast gallery of characters, including Laclos and Marx, Benjamin and Chateaubriand, Sainte-Beuve and Levi-Strauss, Max Stirner and Joseph de Maistre. And presiding over them all is the French statesman Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, who knew the secrets of both the Old and New regimes and who was able to adjust the perplexing and cruel notion of "legitimacy" to the modern age. Cynical Talleyrand - who showed that success in the new era depends on agility, fluidity, and a consummate sense of style - serves, fittingly, as the master of ceremonies throughout the book,which is at once a meditation on the origins and nature of power and a breathtaking synthesis of Western cultural history. It is an extraordinary reading experience.