Synopses & Reviews
In La Folie Baudelaire, Roberto Calasso—one of the most original and acclaimed writers on literature, art, culture, and mythology—turns his attention to the poets and writers of Paris in the nineteenth century who created what was later called “the Modern.” His protagonist is Charles Baudelaire: poet of “nerves,” art love, pioneering critic, man about Paris. Calasso ranges through Baudelaires life and work, focusing on two painters—Ingres and Delacroix—about whom Baudelaire wrote acutely, and then turns to Degas and Manet, who followed in the tracks Baudelaire laid down in his great essay The Painter of Modern Life. In Calassos lavishly illustrated mosaic of stories, insights, close readings of poems, and commentaries on paintings, Baudelaires Paris comes brilliantly to life.
In the eighteenth century, a Folie was a garden pavilion set aside for people of leisure, a place of delight and fantasy. Following Baudelaire, Calasso has created a brilliant and dramatic “Folie Baudelaire”—a place where the reader can encounter the poet himself, his peers, his city, and his extraordinary likes and dislikes, finally discovering that that places is situated in the middle of the land of “absolute literature.”
Review
“In his career as a publisher and writer, Calasso has always shown himself to be a voracious reader, but he reveals himself in [Tiepolo Pink] as a no less ravenous observer who brings a voluptuary delight to all his descriptions.” —Ingrid D. Rowland, The New York Review of Books
Review
Praise for La Folie Baudelaire:
“Roberto Calassos book, written in magnificent and supple prose and illustrated with reproductions of often little-known works of art, responds admirably to its title: its the most absorbing guided visit that one could imagine of the brothel-museum of Baudelaires dreams . . . One exits amazed by the intelligence and erudition of the guide, the foremost expert on a romantic and decadent Paris in which the rococo and neo-classical epochs remained living and present under the surface. And silently running throughout this account are the contradictory facets of the most gifted man in Paris at that time, Baudelaire, lover and critic of art, poet, journalist, bohemian, and dandy.” —Marc Fumaroli, Commentaire
“Roberto Calasso [is] the most inquisitively suggestive literary critic in the world today . . . La Folie Baudelaire is no narrow study of the poet's work or, even worse, a birth-to-death biography. Rather, by associating the poet with the prominent writers and artists with whom he came into contact, Calasso has created what he calls ‘analogical history . . . an ever-more-urgent desideratum in an intellectually debilitated epoch such as the present. A questioning assault upon the received wisdom, it exposes the hollow triumph of Impressionism and its artists, Renoir, Manet, Monet and Degas, over an implacable academy . . . the deeper purpose of Calasso's project can be glimpsed: a subtle inquiry into how the 19th century, and the popular description of it as a century of startling liberatory artistic promise and vast industrial progress, could give birth to a next century defined by Auschwitz, the gulag and Hiroshima.” —Thomas McGonigle, The Los Angeles Times
“[Roberto Calasso is] an ambitious artist-critic, pushing the subject as far as he can, bent on penetrating the mind of both Baudelaire and his time. In the process, he delivers plenty of insight. . . Tough but rewarding, written with bold intelligence and panache.” —Kirkus
“[Roberto Calasso is] a writer about the foundational myths and tales of human society who has no equal in the sparkle of his storytelling and the depth of his learning . . . His writing . . . these lost voices speak again, in magical, uncanny and something even sinister ways . . . La Folie Baudelaire . . . now published in a translation by Alastair McEwen that captures all the shot-silk hues of Calassos elegant, gnomic and epigrammatic prose, returns to that 19th-century ‘landscape of the new through glittering tableaux of the Parisian poets life and work, and the art of his peers, from Ingres to Degas.” —Boyd Tonkin, The Independent (London)
“Calasso has the 19th-century savants light touch in his knowledge of hieroglyphs, Greek myths and Hindu texts, Turkish and Chinese culture and the ‘dandified behaviour of the American Plains Indian. With chapters headed ‘The Natural Obscurity of Things and ‘The Fleeting Sense of Modernity, this well-illustrated volume is not a book for the faint-hearted. It is as red-blooded as art criticism gets, and a suitable encomium for the greatest of art critics.” —Jad Adams, The Telegraph
“Let us lavish praise where praise is due: Roberto Calasso is the pre-eminent public intellectual of Western Europe, and perhaps the Western world. His extensive writings aim at nothing less than the recovery and reappropriation of the foundations of civilization. And he pursues his aim by reshaping and redirecting our vision toward the often obscure, but profoundly rich, synthesis of art, philosophy, literature and cultural theory that lies at the root of our identities . . . [In La Folie Baudelaire] he turns his formidable intellect to the birth of an era closer to home: the modern . . . [Calasso is] brilliant . . . pervasive in his studies . . . inventive in his narrative structure . . . Always surprising, never predictable, Calasso picks a progenitor of modernity that none of us would suspect . . . Charles Baudelaire, the Parisian enfant terrible, emblem of decadence and damnation to the status quo. Such eccentricity on Calassos part allows “La Folie Baudelaire” to shine forth as his most accessible, satisfying book . . . to read Calassos beautiful synthesis of the age in which Baudelaire flourished is to understand the poet as a Virgil to our Dante—exploring the labyrinthine depths of modernitys cult of endless images . . . For we moderns, as Calasso elegantly and authoritatively demonstrates, and as Baudelaire foretold: The future is now.” —Arlice Davenport, The Wichita Eagle
Praise for Roberto Calasso:
“[Calasso] has certainly managed to open a new road through the old landscape of literature.” —John Banville, The New York Review of Books
“[The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony] is the kind of book one comes across only once or twice in ones lifetime . . . Is this, then, the work of a Mediterranean genius? Of a genius, thats certain. And its all Calassos own . . . I suggest you take a closer look at this books author, for he, I think, is less mortal than most of us. His book certainly is.” —Joseph Brodsky
“Calasso is not only immensely learned; he is one of the most original thinkers and writers we have today.” —Charles Simic
“Roberto Calasso [is] an exceptionally accessible thinker, original and profound . . . [His] creative energy is active throughout [K.]. He claims to present Kafkas work as ‘illuminated by its own light, and succeeds in a unique way.” —Muriel Spark, The Times Literary
Synopsis
In La Folie Baudelaire, Roberto Calasso--one of the most original and acclaimed writers on literature, art, culture, and mythology--turns his attention to the poets and writers of Paris in the nineteenth century who created what was later called the Modern. His protagonist is Charles Baudelaire: poet of nerves, art love, pioneering critic, man about Paris. Calasso ranges through Baudelaire's life and work, focusing on two painters--Ingres and Delacroix--about whom Baudelaire wrote acutely, and then turns to Degas and Manet, who followed in the tracks Baudelaire laid down in his great essay The Painter of Modern Life. In Calasso's lavishly illustrated mosaic of stories, insights, close readings of poems, and commentaries on paintings, Baudelaire's Paris comes brilliantly to life.
In the eighteenth century, a Folie was a garden pavilion set aside for people of leisure, a place of delight and fantasy. Following Baudelaire, Calasso has created a brilliant and dramatic Folie Baudelaire--a place where the reader can encounter the poet himself, his peers, his city, and his extraordinary likes and dislikes, finally discovering that that places is situated in the middle of the land of absolute literature.
Synopsis
A spectacular act of close reading and looking by a great writerIn La Folie Baudelaire, Roberto Calasso—one of the most original and acclaimed writers on literature, art, culture, and mythology—turns his attention to the poets and writers of Paris in the nineteenth century who created what was later called “the Modern.” His protagonist is Charles Baudelaire: poet of “nerves,” art lover, pioneering critic, man about Paris. Calasso ranges through Baudelaires life and work, focusing on two painters—Ingres and Delacroix—about whom Baudelaire wrote acutely, and then turns to Degas and Manet, who followed in the tracks Baudelaire laid down in his great essay “The Painter of Modern Life.” In Calassos lavishly illustrated mosaic of stories, insights, close readings of poems, and commentaries on paintings, Baudelaires Paris comes brilliantly to life.
In the eighteenth century, a folie was a garden pavilion set aside for people of leisure, a place of delight and fantasy. Following Baudelaire, Calasso has created a brilliant and dramatic “Folie Baudelaire”—a place where the reader can encounter the poet himself, his peers, his city, and his extraordinary likes and dislikes, finally discovering that that place is situated in the middle of the land of “absolute literature.”
About the Author
Roberto Calasso, publisher of Adelphi in Milan, is the author of many books, among them The Ruin of Kasch, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Ka, K., and Tiepolo Pink, all parts of a work in progress of which La Folie Baudelaire is the sixth panel.
Alastair McEwen has translated almost ninety books of fiction and nonfiction and seven feature film scripts, as well as radio play adaptations, operative librettos, and many hundreds of articles for various magazines and newspapers. He has also translated some of Italys finest writers (Calasso, Eco, Tabucchi, and many others). He lives and works in Milan.