A vigorous rendering of the remote past.
A universe of blood, violence, and magic.
In the 11th volume of a project that began in 1983, Italian publisher, translator, and polymath Calasso (1941-2021) continues his investigation of ancient religion and philosophy with an interpretation of Mesopotamian mythology. Translated by Parks, the narrative unfolds as a conversation between Utnapishtim and Sindbad, a sailor who washes up on the island of Dilmun, where Utnapishtim has lived for thousands of years under the protection of Ea, god of fresh water. “I would have liked to be someone who dwells in the midst of everything and sees afar,” he tells the sailor. “Instead, my fate has been to see afar, but from a place no one else can reach.” Central to his stories are a host of vengeful, capricious, murderous gods who create humans from clay and gods’ blood only to become annoyed when their creations become too boisterous and noisy. The solution: a flood to destroy the Earth and its unruly inhabitants. But at Ea’s bidding, Utnapishtim builds a vessel to save all living creatures and is rewarded by spending eternity on Dilmun. Foremost among the magical objects coveted by gods and men is the Tablet of Destinies, “in which everything that was and was becoming the world could concentrate.” The Tablet instructed “how to celebrate the rites and implement the law.” It ensured order. Men yearn for certainty, Utnapishtim observes, for which they make sacrifices to appease gods; protect themselves “behind a barrier of prayers, invocations, exorcisms”; and worship talismans, spells, and omens. “We lived in terror of everything that happens by chance,” he admits. “A few signs etched on a clay tablet went some way to keeping things in check.” Calasso depicts a blood-soaked universe where hundreds of gods battle for supremacy and where men prefer “to live bound tight by destiny than abandoned to the turbulence of chance.”
A vigorous rendering of the remote past.Pub Date: July 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-60501-8
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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