The Book of All Books review – full of revenge, gore, betrayal – and sex

The Book of All Books by Robert Calasso, translated by Tim Parks (Allen Lane), £25.00.

The great trick of Roberto Calasso, the legendary Italian publisher and author who died last summer at the age of 80, is to reorientate and recount great stories of the past in a completely beguiling and novel manner. The Book of All Books is the lastest to be translated into English by the talented Tim Parks, and it is perhaps his most ambitious literary escapade of them all. 

Taking its title from Goethe, it is the repackaging of the Old Testament from the founding story of Genesis through the Patriarchs and the Prophets and the attendance of the Messiah. A topic in which Calasso is at his most provocative, and elusive.

“He takes you back to stories that you thought you knew well – and I come from a background steeped in the Charismatic movement – but here they appear in a fresh and original light,” says Parks.

The story of the people of Israel being chosen, cursed, punished, exiled, yet repeatedly redeemed as God’s chosen ones is not in any way presented as a polemic. There is nothing of Milton or Dante about this, of “justifying God’s way to man”, or the trials of ascent to the Celestial Rose at the conclusion of the Divine Comedy. “Calasso is very playful,” says Parks, “saying to the reader these are the facts as I have chosen them. Make up your own mind.”

“It makes translation quite difficult – to keep it light – and especially when it comes to the quotations from the Latin text. I had to work hard to make sure that it didn’t come across as a plodding schoolboy translation.” This is quite an admission from Parks, one of the most accomplished translators of Italian into English today. 

He has translated Moravia, Calvino and Machiavelli. In his translation and essays on the Prince (Il Principe), he provided one of the most original accounts of that much-maligned, misunderstood piece of advice to Renaissance rulers, or anyone else for that matter, facing regime failure.

There is a wonderfully episodic feel to this version of the Old Testament story. There are pages of rambling, colourful anecdotes, and pithy observation. 

In a profound sense, it is a reflection of how Frankie Howerd described Hollywood Old Testament epics by the likes of Cecil B. DeMille as “Carry On Bible”. Colour is dragged in from other contemporary sources and legends. The details are related with a straight face, or perhaps we should say a straight pen – Calasso always wrote in longhand allegedly.

Abraham dies at the age of 132, and Noah, in his drunkenness, is covered by Canaan, the son of Ham, and is reviled for it. Calasso does not hint whether he thinks these are history or pieces of creative writing.

All is told as fact, leaving it to the reader to judge. In the words of the late, great Frankie Howerd, Calasso appears to be saying to his audience, “Oh, please yourselves, dears.”

There is a coherent architecture to the book, however much Calasso tries to hide it. The story is the choosing of Israel, from the Creation to the Patriarchs, broken by the missteps of the Tower of Babel and the Flood. This period is the period of Grace. With Moses, the time of the Prophets begins leading to the anticipation of the Messiah, the ninth Prophet in the line of succession from Moses himself. This is the period of the Law – based on the Covenant made between Yahweh (Jehovah), the one invisible God of the Jews, and his chosen people.  

The story from Genesis to Moses is one of individuals and Grace, and the story from Moses is one of community and the Law. With the Exodus of the children of Israel out of Egypt, we are at another breakpoint: “With the prophets we enter the world of facts,” writes Calasso. 

The progress of Israel, through the building of the Temple by Solomon, the destruction of the Temple in 586 BCE, the exile in Babylon, right through the to the crucifixion of Christ and the destruction of the Second Temple by Titus 70 CE, are matters of record. The progress of the Jewish from Moses on is history, fashioned and pioneered in a unique manner.

The whole story, as fermented and decanted by Calasso, is full of revenge, gore, betrayal – and sex. “There is an awful lot of sex and the erotic,” says Parks. Calasso suggests that it is by sleeping around the Israelites reached out to the other peoples around them, from the Moabites to the Egyptians – the excesses the King James Bible calls their “fornications” and “whoredoms”. 

Calasso shows women and the erotic in a quite original light. The understated roles of Sarah, Rachel, Rahab and Ruth are vital in pushing the narrative of Israel forward.

Calasso is also fixated on sacrifice, the sheer scale and brutality of what he calls the “holocausts” – from the Greek word – and the “anathema” as he labels the hundreds of thousands of sheep, oxen, and humans slain and made burned offerings. Mutilation was part of the binding to Yahweh from the first circumcision by Abraham on himself “with a hatchet”. Later, St John Chrysostom commented on the contract implied: “circumcision imposes on you the entire yoke of the Law.”

Following the Romans’ destruction of the second Temple, circumcision and sacrifice of animals, a common practice in the Temple, went into abeyance. Circumcision was revived as a notion by the great Maimonides of Cordoba. In his Guide for the Perplexed, he wrote, “As regards circumcision, I think that one of its objects is to limit sexual intercourse, and to weaken the organ of generation as far as possible, and thus cause man to be moderate.” 

Calasso quotes this with relish, adding that Maimonides also counselled that the way to mitigate erotic arousal and sexual over-excitement was to turn to study in the synagogue. Maimonides, the greatest of 12th-century sages, is an important figure in the conclusion of Calasso’s book. He fervently anticipated the arrival of the Messiah and the subsequent Resurrection of the Dead: 

“When the Messiah comes, he will very likely pass unobserved, because he will only change some small things. And no one knows which.” This is Calasso at his most cryptic.

He is at his most provocative fun in a crisp chapter about Freud and his whole take on the story of the Jewish people. It comes from nowhere towards the end of the book and is based on Freud’s last book about the history of the Jews, and the earlier books about dreams and neurosis, and totems and taboos. 

Freud wrestles with the uniqueness of the story of the Jews and the children of Israel, to which he feels both attached and yet distant. In his quirky analysis of the Jewish depiction of the founding father – Yahweh – both Freud and Calasso are at their most puckish and provocative – and sneakily profound.

The collaboration between author and translation was exacting and exciting, says Parks. “His English was good enough to understand exactly what I was doing. He was extraordinary – he kept himself out of the media limelight. He didn’t want to write columns for the big papers like Corriere and Repubblica. He didn’t get involved with contemporary scholars – the scholars he refers to are from seventy or more years ago.”

“He was very careful about reviews – and kept two copies of every reference to him in reviews and articles in his archive,” he says.

He matched writing with running one of Italy’s leading literary publishing houses, Adelphi. “It was a great achievement and success. He brought attention to central European writers that might have been missed – such as Joseph Roth, (The Radetzky March and The Emperor’s Tomb). Goodness knows what happens to Adelphi now; he will be much missed.”

Parks himself is engaged in more translations and his novels, essays and reflections on Italy’s past in its present. Last year he published The Heroes’ Way, in which he followed the route taken by Giuseppe Garibaldi and his followers on their retreat from Rome to Ravenna, after a failed republican insurrection in Rome in 1849.

Garibaldi features in the new project. Last year, in a lull in Covid, Parks and his partner Eleonora took the route of Garibaldi and the Thousand from their landing at Marsala in their successful march on Palermo in 1860. 

“It was hot, we had to wear masks in the open air, and we had to be tested (for Covid) all the time. The presence of control and the state was everywhere. Think back to those men who landed, and the Sicilians who joined them – they were half starving, didn’t know what would happen, and most expected to die. A complete contrast to our own (hyper) controlled times.”

The story of his march to Palermo should be with us soon. No doubt it will have the quirky touches for which Parks is renowned and excels in his own way, as Calasso does in his. With The Book of All Books, we have an eccentric masterpiece. “It is episodic and fragmented,” says its translator, “and you can enjoy it like that pick it up and read it in parts.”

It is one of the most brilliantly provocative and witty accounts of history and letters I have read for years – and wondrously managed and moderated by its translator Tim Parks.