The Ruin Of Kasch - Tapa blanda

"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)

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.