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.

This is an intriguing and ingenious book.

It exhibits much of the vividness and wide-ranging erudition of [Calasso's] earlier book, but the results are more uneven. Calasso’s retelling is intentionally an intellectual potpourri, and that is the source both of its appeal and its weakness. He begins with a midrash, the characteristic early rabbinic mode of exegesis that amplifies, elaborates and sometimes reinvents the spare biblical text. Other midrashim are then introduced from time to time as well as midrashim that one assumes are Calasso’s own invention. For some stretches of the book, he simply retells the canonical narrative, and these sections are not likely to be of much interest to anyone already familiar with the Bible. More welcome are the frequent junctures in which he midrashically fleshes out what is tersely told in the Bible.

He writes engagingly, in short, direct sentences and discrete paragraphs, which are rendered clearly into English by Tim Parks. And he is faithful to his source material, often supplementing it with details from the Mishnah, the post-biblical Jewish tradition, and from his own pen.

In this probing inquiry into biblical mysteries, the author meditates on the complexities and contradictions of key events and figures.

Italian publisher and writer Calasso...once again muses eloquently on the Bible in this 10th entry in his series dedicated to exploring ancient myths and the human search for meaning.