La Folie Baudelaire - Softcover

Calasso, Roberto

4.13

263 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374534071 ISBN 13: 9780374534073

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2014

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La Folie Baudelaire Originally published: Milan, Italy: Adelphi Edizioni, 2008.

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Review:

Written in magnificent and supple prose...it's the most absorbing guided visit that one could imagine of the brothel-museum of Baudelaire's dreams . . . running throughout this account are the contradictory facets of the most gifted man in Paris at that time, Baudelaire, lover and critic of art, poet, journalist, bohemian, and dandy (Marc Fumaroli, Commentaire)

Roberto Calasso [is] the most inquisitively suggestive literary critic in the world today . . (Thomas McGonigle, The Los Angeles Times)

A joy to read (Emma Hogan, Financial Times)

Arresting observations on painters and paintings alike, aided and abetted by some discriminatingly chosen illustrations, beautifully reproduced . . . La Folie Baudelaire is bedazzling (Alex Danchev, The Guardian)

His eye for illuminating anecdote is peerless. Thus he informs us of Alberthe de Rubempr� who 'was the mistress, in rapid succession, of Delacroix, Stendhal and M�rim�e,' before waspishly adding: 'Each of them spoke too well of her to his best friend-and was then promptly ousted by him.' . . . La Folie Baudelaire is a concrete triumph, for its recreation of Baudelaire's milieu is so intensely vivid as to miraculously transform the distantly anecdotal into the seemingly actual (Lucian Robinson, The Guardian)

What a rare and special book this is, from its opening paragraph . . . But then what a rare writer is the prolific, post-Calvino Italian master Roberto Calasso-72-year-old scholar, translator, author of film scripts, radio and television adaptations, operatic librettos and seemingly most other viable prose forms in the late 20th and early 21st centuries . . . [La Folie Baudelaire is] an ideal introduction in English to one of the most urbane and readable of living masters (Jeff Simon, Buffalo News)

It is a gorgeous, willful, and convincing re-staging of Baudelaire's style . . . (Adam Thirlwell,)

Smoothing the way is the curiously conversational tone in which even the most arcane information is conveyed, as well as the underlying sense that, as the author piles detail upon detail, he's having a huge amount of fun. Calasso may identify with his hero, but there is no Baudelairean melancholy in his work. There's no show-off either-only a sincere delight, an innocent reveling in his own encyclopedic mind at play. This mood is catching, and if one adopts the right dreamy pace, one can commune with Calasso through a kind of imaginative osmosis (Andrea Lee, New Yorker)

[Roberto Calasso is] an ambitious artist-critic, pushing the subject as far as he can, bent on penetrating the mind of both Baudelaire and his time. In the process, he delivers plenty of insight. . . Tough but rewarding, written with bold intelligence and panache (Kirkus)

[Roberto Calasso is] a writer about the foundational myths and tales of human society who has no equal in the sparkle of his storytelling and the depth of his learning . . . His writing . . . these lost voices speak again, in magical, uncanny and something even sinister ways . . . (Boyd Tonkin, The Independent)

About the Author:

Roberto Calasso, the publisher of Adelphi in Milan, is the author of many books, among them The Ruin of Kasch, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Ka, K., and Tiepolo Pink, all parts of a work in progress of which La Folie Baudelaire is the sixth panel. Alastair McEwen has translated almost ninety books of fiction and nonfiction and seven feature filmscripts, as well as radio-play adaptations, opera librettos, and many hundreds of articles for various magazines and newspapers. He has also translated some of Italy's finest writers (Calasso, Eco, Tabucchi, and many others). He lives and works in Milan.

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