Words, images, analogies. Stories, myths, returns: on everything, and for everything, books. This is the very active life of Roberto Calasso, the writer and publisher (in this order of importance, and I know that many will turn up their noses on this), who passed away yesterday in Milan at the age of 80. . He was ill and perhaps therefore he had, recently, an anomalous “rush” to publish: in a few months here are the latest books written. And for one of those sinister games of fate, which loves to make fun of our lives, Calasso disappeared on the release day of two (even) autobiographical texts. Two books that substantiate a series of iridescences that refract throughout his life and work; and they accomplish it, in some way: Bobby, memorial essay dedicated to Bobi Bazlen, his publishing teacher; Meme Scianca, poignant childhood diary, filtered with the gifts (and holes) that, alone, memory can make: and it is, this little book, the happy discovery of an intimate and fragile Calasso, who reinterprets distant yet qualifying episodes, without fear of to discover and offer his clearly more vulnerable sides than the figure of majestic intellectual caliber to which he has accustomed us. Calasso had been the protagonist of Italian publishing since the creation of Adelphi (on the initiative of Bazlen and Foà), in 1962, and since 1971 he had led it into the sea of books, drawing an inimitable trajectory of coherence (personal and public) and unlimited. Adelphi, thanks to his formidable intuition as a very fine reader and publisher (the last of the publishing industry of publishers), had, and has, constituted an “alternative canon” of literature and graphics on the Italian and international scene. The Adelphi books, in bookstores, do not converge in isolation, in non-fiction or literature, dispersing themselves in the alphabetical order: on the contrary, they form a uniform block, perceived as a “whole”, of which each title is a constituent part.
It was the same effect that, consciously, Calasso had foreseen for his activity as a writer. Complex, magmatic, courageous weaver of analogies without fearing the reader’s difficulties in getting into his texts, Calasso, after an “erratic” but seminal narrative debut as The impure insane (1974), he then hatched an Opera that starting from The ruin of Kasch (1983) unfolded as a “snake” of over 5,000 pages which includes The wedding of Cadmus and Harmony (1988), Ka (1996), K. (2002), The Tiepolo pink (2006), The Baudelaire Madness (2008), The ardor (2010), The celestial hunter (2016), The current unmentionable (2017), The book of all books (2019) e The Tablet of Destinies (2020). An impossible (and useless) work to summarize, a large fresco that, with the essays de I quarantanove gradini (1991), Literature and the gods (2001), One hundred letters to a stranger (2003), The madness that comes from the Nymphs (2005), The imprint of the publisher (2013) e Sir Thomas Browne’s hieroglyphs (2018, the topic of his dissertation), forms a only in Italian and world literature. The disappearance of Calasso is one of those gaps that suddenly widen, and forces anyone to face the loss in an original and, if possible, constructive way. And if for the Adelphi, whoever takes his place, his absence will weigh like a boulder (since, in any case, it will be irreplaceable), for the entire Italian culture instead he will be, over time, a giant to deal with. . Like Umberto Eco, Calasso will henceforth provide a yardstick, so broad and solid, in publishing and literature, as to be paradigmatic. Full of exemplary value, already classic in some of its movements, his work, words and ideas more solid than bronze, will acquire, over time, the status of a warning, a monument or, better, a prophecy, at least for us. his admirers. For the envious, and less prepared, his catalog will simply remain a mirage.
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