Books, Arts & Manners: The Secret of His Success

The Ruin of Kasch, by Roberto Calasso (Harvard, 352 pp., $24.95)

SURELY Roberto Calasso’s The Ruin of Kasch is the most thorough waste of time I’ve experienced in many months. There is a sadness about the book. For one starts reading it, having first been seduced by the reviews, in the honest hope that something will come from one’s investing so much time in it. But before long —say, by the second page—it is painfully apparent that the book is going nowhere. “No,” the reader says to himself, “no pleasure will be had today. Nothing will be learnt and nothing remembered.” And if the reader subscribes to the Puritan ethic that requires one to finish every book one starts, he has many unhappy and un-remunerative hours ahead of him.

JG

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James Gardner

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The Ruin of Kasch, by Roberto Calasso (Harvard, 352 pp., $24.95)

SURELY Roberto Calasso’s The Ruin of Kasch is the most thorough waste of time I’ve experienced in many months. There is a sadness about the book. For one starts reading it, having first been seduced by the reviews, in the honest hope that something will come from one’s investing so much time in it. But before long —say, by the second page—it is painfully apparent that the book is going nowhere. “No,” the reader says to himself, “no pleasure will be had today. Nothing will be learnt and nothing remembered.” And if the reader subscribes to the Puritan ethic that requires one to finish every book one starts, he has many unhappy and un-remunerative hours ahead of him.