The Ruin of Kasch - Couverture rigide

Calasso, Roberto

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0856357138 ISBN 13 : 9780856357138

Editeur : Carcanet Press Ltd, 1994

Synopsis

In the African kingdom of Kasch the king should be sacrificed when the stars come into a particular alignment. One day a stranger arrives who tells such good yarns the priests forget to watch the skies. The king survives. Sacrifice is abolished, but the kingdom begins to decline. Using this Bedouin legend Roberto Calasso questions the legitimacy of power, tyranny and sacrifice. Talleyrand is the master of ceremonies and guides the reader into real and symbolic places. We are accompanied by Marie-Antoinette, Bentham, Goethe, Baudelaire, Marx, Chateaubriand, three gruesome assassins and assorted other folk. They all contribute to Calasso's vision of history which encompasses both narrative and reflection and reveals how ideas and actual events impinge upon one another.

A propos du livre

Revue de presse

"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 hapened in human history, from the beginning of civilisation until today... It is 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)

"A work charged with intelligence and literary seduction... 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" (New York Times Book Review)

"This is a great, fat, jewel-box of a book, gleaming with obscure treasures" (John Banville)

"Unique, idiosyncratic and vaultingly ambitious... essentail reading" (Michael Dibdin Independent on Sunday)

"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)

Présentation de l'éditeur

Taking as its focus the periods immediately before and after the French Revolution but making occasional sallies backward and forward in time, Roberto Calasso recounts, elucidates, and interprets the downfall of what Baudelaire was already calling 'the Modern'. The downfall came as a sequel to an earlier and opposite collapse: that of archaic societies which were regulated by the movements of the stars and the rituals of sacrifice. At the centre of the work stands the story of Kasch, a legendary African kingdom whose annihilation becomes emblematic of the ruin of the ancient and modern world.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Carcanet Press Ltd
• Date d'édition: 1994
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0856357138
• ISBN 13: 9780856357138
• Reliure: Relié
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 320
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible