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Book of a lifetime

 BOOK OF A    years later, after interminable
 LIFETIME revisions, would be thus: “On a beach
  in Sidon a bull was aping a lover’s coo.
 THE MARRIAGE OF CADMUS It was Zeus. He shuddered, the way he
 AND HARMONY did when a gadfly got him. But this
  time it was a sweet shuddering. Eros
 BY ROBERTO CALASSO was lifting a girl onto its back:
  Europa.”
1 I pick up books with scepticism. It’s as4    It was an entirely new reading
 if I were eager to discover they were of experience. After 20 pages, I had
 no interest to me so that I could safely phoned New York and told them I
 put them down again. And when The would do it. Calasso has a remarkable
 Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony capacity to dart in and out of stories,
 was thrust into my hands at the telling them in different ways with
 Frankfurt Book Fair in 1990, I was different details; there is no tedious
 doubly sceptical. Because at the time explanation, no questioning of validity.
 its title was Le nozze di Cadmo e Dazzling, even bewildering at first, a
 Armonia and an American lady wanted vast body of bizarre material slowly
 me to translate it. “It’s a wonderful declares itself in vibrant patterns. It is
 book about the Greek gods,” she as if a gallery of ruined paintings had
 enthused, “by the Italian scholar and been restored to animate life, each
 publisher, Roberto Calasso.” calling to the others, complementing
2    So it was easy to say no. The book and contradicting, or keeping secrets,
 was 400-plus pages. I was already telling lies. The rooms of the gallery
 thinking I must stop translating to are a maze and some demented
 have more time for my own work. I was attendant must be shifting the noisy
 not interested in the Greek gods, and canvases about so that they laugh and
 certainly not in an Italian academic’s quarrel together in new ways.
 verbose and dusty take on them. Eventually, surprise subsides into
3    “Please, Tim,” the lady insisted, recognition: these are Europe’s
 “just give it ten pages.” That plea rang ancestors; with a shiver you are bound
 a bell. It was what I used to ask when I to admit that their way of seeing the
 sent in an unsolicited manuscript. It world was at least as sophisticated as
 was one of the most important yours. I learned a thousand stylistic
 decisions of my career, my life in a devices translating this book, and stole
 way. Back home in Verona, I opened as many as I could for my own writing.
 the first page and read, in Italian, an But most of all it inspired an orgy of
 epigraph from Sallust: “These things reading in any number of directions.
 never happened, but are always.” Is it Quite suddenly life and, yes, even love
 possible, I wondered, to write such a was different and new.
 tense sequence in English? And then Tim Parks
 the opening paragraph, which two