Calasso, Roberto - Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, The (Knopf, 1993).pdf

IN PRAISE OF

THE MARRIAGE OF CADMUS AND HARMONY

"Roberto Calasso's aim in his startling and beautiful book, The Marriage of

Cadmus and Harmony, is to make us understand, once more, the necessity

of myth, not just as fable and fantasy but as a way of comprehending our

own nature.

'A life in which the gods are not invited is n't worth living,' he writes at

the close of his book. And for hundreds of pages, through his phenomenal

power of poetic narrative, we have indeed shared their company, through

the Homeric epics toward that wedding feast in Thebes from which human

history was born.

Calasso has not been content to describe or analyze this rich garment of

myth. He has spun and woven it from new yarn, so that we experience its

power as we are learning its complexity. His is a book rich in anthropological

insight, but it will be read and re-read not as treatise but as story: one of the

most extraordinary that has ever been written of the origins of Western

self-consciousness." -sIMoN s cHAMA

"I have no idea whether or not Roberto Calasso is a 'genius' but I do know

that The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony is a perfect work like no other.

He has re-created, in a blaze of light, the morning of our world: the gods,

heroes, monsters of the Greeks are made mysterious sense of in what is,

finally, a numinous text to be placed beside- ahead of?- Old and New

testaments.'' -GORE VIDAL