The Marriage Of Cadmus And Harmony

"The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony" by Roberto Calasso

Knopf, $25 The problem with ancient myths and legends is that the characters, whether gods or humans, become stick figures, not really feeling or experiencing life the way we do. Roberto Calasso has gone a long way toward correcting that. "The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony," his retelling of Greek myths, is compelling, immediate and fleshy. When a god deflowers a virgin in Calasso's book, we see the blood and feel her bitterness. And yet Calasso moves on, as life moves on, dispassionately.

Calasso's particular focus on the myths is the relationship of gods and humans, a relationship that ended at the wedding feast alluded to in the book's title. We are frequently reminded that Calasso is speaking to us, a 20th-century audience, by his frequent allusions to our own cultural myths: Freud, Nietzsche and the like. He is not playing the ancient bard here; his sensibility is absolutely modern, and his prose is conveyed beautifully by Tim Parks, whose translation from the Italian doesn't read at all like a translation.

The scope of this book is enormous, but Calasso deals with his subjects in short, bite-size pieces. The pieces themselves are easily digested by the average reader, but the web with which they are held together is tortuous and may lose a few people. Do not expect light reading here. After all, Calasso is reconstructing the

cosmos.