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52
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
51/100Critics
53/100Scholars
Author:
Roberto Calasso, Tim Parks
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Date:
November 23, 2021
In this latest offering from Italian scholar Roberto Calasso, who passed away in 2021 at 80 years old, he explores the Hebrew Bible as part of his lifelong project of examining the through-lines and implications of Western mythologies, religious texts and literature.
What The Reviewers Say
What is refreshing about Calasso’s work is the opportunity he provides us of reading these accounts as stories—neither excised and repackaged, as they sometimes are in lessons read in church; nor charged with communicating a moral message. Not that his retellings are wholly disinterested; Calasso is intellectually drawn to the darker themes of rape, abduction, murder and blood sacrifice, even as he ponders their prevalence in myth-making across cultures and time. Calasso also reads beautifully (even in translation). Readers will appreciate how he sketches biblical characters, presenting them to us in colloquially colourful ways.
The subject of The Book of All Books is the Hebrew Bible, and Calasso’s principal technique...is to select and retell a great many stories. This is more interesting than it sounds, in part because his selection is cunning and his narrative gifts considerable.
Calasso presumably did not think that such stories as the account of the creation in Genesis 1–2 were literal truth, but he describes them in the same rather neutral style as he does for more plausibly historical accounts such as the stories of the Hebrew kings. At the same time, the biblical stories are often enriched by attractive details from later Jewish legends as found in Midrashim and other later sources, occasionally also from kabbalistic traditions.
Moving between retellings of biblical stories, heuristic commentary and speculative cultural theory, Calasso spins an epic that is heroic and anti-heroic at once. Portraits of Saul, David, Solomon, Abraham and Moses present a chronicle of relentless patriarchy but Calasso’s attention wanders constantly to the figures on the fringes.
