Imprint: Peng. Mod. Classics
Language & Literary Studies
The Ruin of Kasch
A brilliant new translation of a classic work on violence and revolution as seen through mythology and art.
The Ruin of Kasch takes up two subjects: "the first is Talleyrand, and the second is everything else," wrote Italo Calvino when the book first appeared in 1983. Hailed as one of those rare books that persuade us to see our entire civilization in a new light, its guide is the French statesman Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, who knew the secrets of the ancien régime and all that came after, and was able to adapt the notion of "legitimacy" to the modern age. Roberto Calasso follows him through a vast gallery of scenes set immediately before and after the French Revolution, making occasional forays backward and forward in time, from Vedic India to the porticoes of the Palais-Royal and to the killing fields of Pol Pot, with appearances by Goethe and Marie Antoinette, Napoleon and Marx, Walter Benjamin and Chateaubriand. At the centre stands the story of the ruin of Kasch, a legendary kingdom based on the ritual killing of the king and emblematic of the ruin of ancient and modern regimes.
Pub date: 1 March 2018
Born in Florence, Roberto Calasso lives in Milan, where he is publisher of Adelphi. He is the author of The Ruin of Kasch, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, which was the winner of the Prix Veillon and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, Literature and the Gods, Ka and K.
Also by Roberto Calasso
Furious Hours
Of All That Ends
The Ten Types of Human
Dexter Dias
The Bottom Corner
A Smell of Burning
Colin Grant
Isabel Buchanan
The Swordfish and the Star
Gavin Knight
Alexandra Joel
That's Not English
Leaving Before the Rains Come
Our Word Is Our Weapon
Reading Myself And Others
Bodies In Motion and At Rest
Gift from the Sea
Fridays with my Folks
Amal Awad