The Forty-Nine Steps
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- £7.99
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
In books lauded as brilliant, exhilarating and profound, Roberto Calasso has revealed the unexpected intersections of ancient and modern through topics ranging from Greek and Indian mythology to what a legendary African kingdom can tell us about the French Revolution. In this first translation of his most important essays, Calasso brings his powerful intellect and elegant prose style to bear on the essential thinkers of our time, providing a sweeping analysis of the current state of Western culture.'Forty-nine steps' refers to the Talmudic doctrine that there are forty-nine steps to meaning in every passage of the Torah. Employing this interpretative approach, Calasso offers a 'secret history' of European literature and philosophy in the wake of Nietzsche, Marx and Freud. Calasso analyses how figures ranging from Gustav Flaubert, Gottfried Benn, Karl Kraus and Martin Heidegger to Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht and Theodor Adorno have contributed to, or been emblematic of, the current state of Western thought. This book's theme, writ large, is the power of the fable - specifically, its persistence in art and literature despite its exclusion from orthodox philosophy. In its breadth and the nature of its concerns, The Forty-nine Steps is a philosophical and literary twin to the widely praised Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. Combining erudition with engaging prose and original insights, Calasso contributes a daring new interpretation of some of the most challenging writers of the past 150 years.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In contrast to Hitchcock's 39, Roberto Calasso prefers The Forty-Nine Steps, the number indicated by the Talmud as the correct amount of exegetical phases in moving toward full Torah passage elucidation. Calasso, the Milanese publisher of Adelphi Edizioni, produced what Gore Vidal called "a perfect work like no other" in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, a retelling and cultural investigation of the origins of the Greek myths. These 49 steps (actually 21 chapters) move forward in time to take on 20th-century literature as it developed in the wake of Freud, Nietzsche and Marx. From the varying fascinations with the case of Daniel Paul Schreber to the red threads spun out by Karl Kraus and "Brecht the Censor," Calasso (as rendered here by Pasolini's translator John Shipley) moves light and fast, but stays grounded, throwing off ideas of his own at every turn.
