The Book of All Books
ROBERTO CALASSO
(ALLEN LANE, 464 PP, £25)
Tablet bookshop price £22.50 • tel 020 7799 4064

Roberto Calasso, Italian publisher and cultural historian (pictured), died in July at the age of 80. His surprise best-seller, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, published in English in 1993, dazzled critics with its arch decoding of classical Greek legends. Some, though, detected a vein of pretension; even Calasso’s long-time translator Tim Parks expressed reservations. (“Clearly there’s mania here, and preciousness, and vanity.”) Another of Calasso’s masterworks, Ka (1996), invented the classical Indian gods for the modern age. Beneath the book’s veneer of sophistication, some reviewers again found evidence of an overloaded erudition and a pinchbeck intellectualism at work.

The Book of All Books is Calasso’s last completed work, and rather good. In pages of allusive prose, it retells dramatic scenes from the Old Testament to interrogate Freudian ideas of ritual killing and sacrifice and the violence inherent generally in human society down the ages. While the Old Testament describes the violent death of only one prophet, Zachariah, who was stoned in the Temple, the apocryphal Vitae Prophetarum (dating from the first century AD) claims that six Jewish prophets died violent deaths. Amos was clubbed to death; Micah, tossed in a pit; Isaiah, sawn in half; Jeremiah, stoned; and Ezekiel, killed by men of the tribes of Dan and Gad. Calasso sees violence as a “natural” feature of human life that thrived in Old Testament times but which we in the modern era have come to suppress.