Roberto Calasso died in Milan on the twenty-eighth of July, 2021. He had been the editorial director of Adelphi Edizioni for fifty-three years and had published, alongside the work of running the press, an eleven-volume cycle he called L'opera in corso, or The Work in Progress. The last of the eleven, Bobi, appeared in Italian in 2021 and in Richard Dixon's English translation in November of 2024. The cycle is now complete.
What the cycle adds up to is the question this piece would like to address. The English-language reception of Calasso has been odd. The early volumes, beginning with The Ruin of Kasch in 1983 and continuing through The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony in 1988 and Ka in 1996, were received as the work of a singular European essayist who had found a way to write about mythology that was neither popular reduction nor academic taxonomy. The middle volumes were received with diminishing attention. The last three, The Book of All Books, The Celestial Hunter, and Bobi, have been reviewed almost not at all.
This is a mistake. The late books are the books in which Calasso's method becomes most visible, and they are the books that retrospectively explain what the early ones were doing.
The method is hard to name. Calasso called the volumes essays, and the word is accurate but inadequate. They are essays only in the sense that Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy is an essay. They proceed by accretion, by quotation, by the placement of one ancient text next to another in such a way that a third meaning emerges from the proximity. They do not argue in the analytic sense. They show.
The Italian originals are published by Adelphi in the recognizable cream covers with the small red dot. The English translations have been issued, in nearly all cases, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, in a uniform paperback design that Marion Duvert undertook in 2018 and that holds together as a shelf in a way few translation series do. The reader who collects all eleven in English will have a uniform brick of nine inches on the shelf, light brown spines, with the titles in a Garamond italic.
Tim Parks did the translation of The Ruin of Kasch. Tim Parks and Robert Bononno did The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. Tim Parks did Ka. From K. in 2005 onward, Richard Dixon has done the bulk of the translation work, with one or two volumes given to other hands. The shift from Parks to Dixon is audible. Parks renders Calasso's long Italian sentences into a slightly more clipped English; Dixon lets them breathe. Whether one prefers the early or the late translation will depend on whether one wants the prose to feel like Calasso or like English. Dixon's choice is, for this reviewer, the right one.
The Celestial Hunter, published in Italian in 2016 and in English in 2020, is the book to give to a reader who wants to understand what Calasso was doing across fifty years. The book is an essay on the pre-historical origins of human cognition by way of the figure of the hunter and the relationship between the hunter and the hunted. It moves from Paleolithic cave paintings to Vedic ritual to the figure of Artemis to the modern mathematician's contemplation of the prime numbers, and it makes the moves without seam.
What it shows, at the end, is that Calasso's project across the eleven volumes is a single argument: that the modern world is the long consequence of a single substitution, the replacement of sacrifice by accounting. Once the gods are no longer paid in blood, they must be paid in something, and what they have come to be paid in is data. The eleven volumes are the assembly of the evidence for this claim.
The claim is not, when stated baldly, novel. Mircea Eliade was making versions of it in the 1950s. Walter Burkert was making more rigorous versions in the 1980s. What Calasso added was the willingness to make the argument in prose that worked as prose, not as scholarship, and the willingness to let the argument be felt rather than asserted.
The Book of All Books, published in 2019 and in Tim Parks's English in 2021, is the volume that engages most directly with the Hebrew Bible. It is the riskiest of the late books, because it places Calasso in territory where the existing scholarship is very deep and the popular interest is very high. Calasso reads the Hebrew Bible as the document in which the substitution he is tracking is first attempted at scale: the moment in which the older blood economy is replaced by a covenantal one.
Some Hebraists have objected. The objections are fair. Calasso is not a Hebraist; his Hebrew is, by his own admission, limited; his readings depend on the translations available to him. But the book is not a contribution to Hebrew Bible scholarship. It is an essay on the Bible by a European essayist who has spent fifty years reading the ancient texts of other cultures and who is asking how the Hebrew text resembles and differs from the others he has read.
Bobi, the final volume, is the odd one. It is a memoir of Calasso's friendship with Roberto Bazlen, the Italian-Triestine reader and editor who, in the 1950s and 1960s, shaped Calasso's intellectual formation and proposed the project that would become Adelphi. Bazlen never wrote a book. He read everything. He had opinions about everything he read. He died in 1965 without having put any of his opinions into print, and the books he had wanted Adelphi to publish became, in Calasso's hands, the press's catalogue for the next half-century.
The book is a strange capstone. After ten volumes of essays on the cognitive history of the species, Calasso closes the cycle with a portrait of a single friend. The proportion looks wrong. On reflection it is not. Bazlen is the figure who taught Calasso that reading is an action, that the editor's choice of what to bring back into print is a position, that the work of a press is the work of a mind extended over time. The cycle ends with the portrait of the man who made the cycle possible.
The English-language reader who wants to enter the cycle should not begin with the first volume. The Ruin of Kasch is the most demanding of the eleven, and it presupposes some of what the later books make explicit. The right entry is The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, which is the most accessible and the most famous; from there, Ka, then The Celestial Hunter, then the others in any order, with Bobi kept for last.
The cycle's commercial position is fragile. Farrar, Straus and Giroux has kept all eleven in print as of this writing, but the print runs of the late volumes have been small, and the trade paperback editions of The Book of All Books and Bobi are unlikely to be reprinted at the current rate of sale. The reader who wants the set should buy it now.
Adelphi itself, since Calasso's death, has continued under the direction of Roberto Colajanni. The catalogue has held. The cream covers and the small red dot still appear on the new books each season. Whether the press will continue to be what it was without Calasso is a question only time will answer, but the first five years suggest that the institution he built has the bones to outlast him.
What the eleven volumes give the contemporary reader is the rarest thing in current letters: a sustained body of essayistic work that does not pretend to be journalism, does not pretend to be scholarship, and does not pretend to be fiction. The category Calasso wrote in has, since his death, had no other practitioner of comparable scale. The reader who wants to see what the European essayistic tradition can do at its limit will not find another shelf like this one.
The eleven books, in the FSG editions, run to a combined 3,847 pages. That is shorter than Knausgaard. It is longer than Sebald. It is the right length for what the project is.
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