The Ruin of Kasch.

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 unremunerative hours ahead of him.

The jacket of The Ruin of Kasch contains, by the way, what is easily the most hubristic, the most hyperbolic, and finally the most idiotic blurb I have ever read. Joseph Brodsky, who knows a thing or two about being overrated, calls Mr. Calasso "a crucible: he mingles East and West; he extracts essences, and the aim is infinity. I would say . . . that Calasso is the only man on the Continent with whom conversation is totally rewarding." First of all, we must question whether any conversation can be totally rewarding if Mr. Brodsky is one of the participants. And what on earth does he mean by "the aim is infinity"?

And yet, for all that, how one wishes one were the author of this book! The presumption of authorial substance, intelligence, and style is so great that his admirers will insist on these virtues even when presented with repeated and irrefragable evidence of their corresponding vices. Mr. Calasso is incapable of maintaining a narrative line, and yet he is appreciated as a storyteller. He understands nothing of the characters whose story he has committed himself to telling, yet he is considered a keen student of human nature. He cannot maintain or develop thought for more than a page, and yet he is considered deep. Though he has but one note on his flimsy aeolian harp, and that a monotonous drone of well-intentioned detachment, he is deemed a great stylist.

The Ruin of Kasch is one of those trumped-up books that emerge about every five years, which appear to be about everything but in fact are about nothing. Its purported theme is the life and character of Talleyrand, Napoleon's foreign minister. The book is chock-a-block with quotations, but not much in the way of narrative. It is astonishing that although Calasso presents us with many pages concerning Talleyrand, one is left knowing precious little about him, and with no more sense of the man than one has of a figure in Madame Tussaud's. He is only a projection of certain things that seem to interest the author. The book returns periodically to Talleyrand after the author has thoroughly bored his readers and himself with some other subject - mythology, sociology, religion, history, art, anthropology. Along the way there are meditations on the cabala - works of this sort always have something on the cabala - Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, Thucydides, Chateaubriand, Goethe, the Arab-Israeli wars, and, naturally, Aztec art. Is this a novel, or a philosophical treatise? It doesn't matter since, in either case, the book is lousy.

Now it is bad enough that Mr. Calasso has nothing to say. But it is how he says it that is really intolerable. His tone is gentle and reasonable, as of one who merely invites artifacts as have prepossessed the author, to share in his admiration and exploration. He likes, he enjoys, he is mightily pleased, to express universal laws. Sadly, to quote him out of context cannot possibly reveal the way that everything feels out of context even when it is in context. It might even make you think he is really saying something: "Sacrifice creates the most tenacious of bonds between society and what is external to it." "As we move backward in history, we see that guilt and evil recede ever further from the wicked intentions of the subject and assume the majestic reality of number." And how about this nugget: "The fabric of the articulated has lacunae." And there are close to four hundred pages more where that came from. It is only when the reader keeps reaching for the golden fruit that seems to be extended to him, and keeps finding that it turns to ash in his mouth, that, if he is honest, he throws the book down in disgust. After all, it is easier to praise the book than to read it. Could that be the secret of Calasso's success?

The title comes from a fable that is told in the course of the book, about a mythical kingdom. Presumably we are supposed to be charmed by the faux naive fabulism of the narrative. We are not. The only interesting thing about this tale, and about the whole book, and about the celebrated Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (which the author wrote much later, but which was translated from the Italian and published here first), is the way they exemplify a moment in our culture. Nowadays the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are in fashion. One sees this in Susan Sontag's Volcano Lover, in Corigliano's opera The Ghosts of Versailles, as well as in the forgettable paintings of Carlo Maria Mariani, to cite only a few of many examples.

But do not be so rash as to think that this taste has anything to do with Dr. Johnson or Edmund Burke. The reason for this popularity is that the age in question, the revolutionary and Napoleonic era, seems to be one of crisis between the modern and the premodern, the industrial and the pre-industrial. It is the first moment in which our narcissistic society can see the emergence of anything like itself. But the classicism it sells us is spurious and third-hand. It is the classicism of Mengs and Canova and Andre Chenier - that is, a pale late-eighteenth-century gloss on classicism, rather than the true, the deep, the powerful source of Western culture. It is the etiolated, anemic, compromised preciosity of this style that so endears itself to postmodern appetites. It is an insidious attack from within, a camping attitude of reverence for something that one essentially cannot understand or truly care about. Until very recently, most of the artifacts of this wayward style were merely a brief chapter in the history of taste. A generation hence, doubtless, they will once again be relegated to that status, and Roberto Calasso with them.