The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

ACCLAIM FOR ROBERTO CALASSO’S THE MARRIAGE OF CADMUS AND HARMONY

“Vivid … a serious entertainment meant to leave the reader with some lingering sense that what seemed remote and forgotten is very much a part of his own very different world.”

— The New York Times Book Review

“Calasso draws on a vast array of variant myths and stories and molds them into a single text … which may be one of the most comprehensive and comprehensible modern attempts at re-creating this vanished world. Part narrative, part meditation, this marvelously engrossing work plunges the reader right into the thick of the mythological action.… Calasso’s concise, straightforward style of storytelling untangles the most complicated plots.… A work of power and grace.”

— Christian Science Monitor

“Strange and alluring … gnomic and down to earth, colloquial and abstract, brilliantly focused and digressive … [A] provocative celebration of the Greek myths.”

— Newsday

“The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony is a masterpiece, in the original sense of that word.… His style skims over the sea of myth with the swiftness and grace of the goddess on her half-shell.… A wonderfully fashioned work of art.”

— John Banville, Irish Times

“Roberto Calasso’s aim in his startling and beautiful book 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.… 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 Schama

“The Greeks would have recognized Roberto Calasso as one of their own … in the same way as they would have recognized Ovid.… This is the kind of book that comes out only once or twice in one’s lifetime.”

— Joseph Brodsky

“Learned, sensuous, dazzlingly intelligent … The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony reads like a novel packed with violent, erotic, multifariously beautiful or resonant stories, held together by a lucidly unsentimental authorial voice. There is no neo-classical flummery here, just the workings of an exhilaratingly vigorous intellect and a vivid appreciation of the world of appearances.… Calasso set himself a formidable task.… He has succeeded absolutely.”

— Lucy Hughes-Hallet, The Sunday Times (London)

“An affirmation of what still lives in the heritage of the Greek religion, this book is not a scholarly treatise but a celebration by a visionary working in the tradition of Ovid — not just to tell us what the myths are but to teach us how to think in myths’ terms, how to look up at a sky and see more than astronomical data and intimidating light-years of empty space.”

— Chicago Tribune

“The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony transcends scholarship, literature and even history.… Mr. Calasso … is a worthy successor of the great mythologists of the past: Homer, Pindar, Euripides, Ovid, Fraser, Robert Graves.”

— Washington Times