Last night I was looking for the paperback publication date of La Folie Baudelaire (still not out, if you’re also waiting, and unfortunately, Calasso is simply not the kind of writer I can read as an ebook.) Instead I stumbled on an interview Calasso had given on French radio last January, on the occasion of the French publication of an essay collection I’d never even known he’d written (because not-translated into English yet — French title: La Folie qui vient de Nymphes.) Actually it is the first time I’d heard him interviewed in French (and, as it happens, later in the interview he talks about how his own father spoke French better than Italian, that it was almost inevitable that he would go on to write about The Ruin of Kasch and about Tallyrand…) He didn’t give many English interviews, and I have no Italian, so it’s a joy, to find that there was a third, shared language, that fortunately my French, while terrible, on this occasion was just barely up to it,

Deftly-handled interview, beginning with his childhood in Florence growing up in the company of books (don’t you just love literary households like he describes here, the non-self-conscious, natural proximity of the child to literature — at one point the interviewer was fishing for remarks about his family’s influence on his literary studies, was he encouraged by them? but he chuckles, no, no: “simplement, les livres etaient la’!“). Talking about, amongst other things (and touching a little on the subject of each of his major works): the nature of folie and possession (divinity or pathology), how The Ruin of Kasch was imagined as a trilogy and how that got away from him (I think he has said something similar in a Paris Review interview also), about the mythological universe and Cadmus and Harmony, about genre and the unclassifiable, about Baudelaire (a lovely bit, about 20mins in, where he was asked why he’d “chosen” Baudelaire for his subjectand he chuckled — he didn’t choose — Baudelaire was the first non-Italian poet he’d read and loved.(I think I’d read somewhere before that a volume of Baudelaire was the first book he’d ever stolen,) Kafka, Hitchcock (they played an extract from Rear Window!), at one point he was even talking about his interest in Thomas Browne and I thought, don’t you think Calasso and W.G. Sebald would have had a lot to say to each other about Browne?

Also there was a wonderful moment, a few minutes into the interview, when he was talking about his entry into the Greek mythological universe, and the interviewer sounded stunned that he was already reading in the originals as a child — that she actually interrupted him — “vous connaissiez le grec et le latin?” (you can hear the wonder, teetering on incredulity, in her voice at that point.) And I love how he brushes that off lightly, slight bemused even, well but yes, nothing unusual about that, he’s been learning it in school since he was 13, “comme tous les Italiens de cette epoque la!” (That last bit is the sort of thing I find endlessly fascinating about countries like Italy and China: enforced access to ancient languages as part of national language identy and cultural heritage. Languages the rest of us have to work to acquire relatively late in life and for research purposes only, but which is already compulsory for school children whose mastery seem so effortless.) Attilio R. (Italian friend) scoffed at me badly when I said that (he dares me to say it to Italian schoolchildren and to face their chorus of raspberries) but then we come from different worlds, for I see the difference between us as that of the new world against the old — he sees the future in the pragmatic foundation upon science and technology, and I look to rejuvenating ideas through the past, through literature and languages.)