No one had crossed that city so wisely and congenially, like some saturnine guardian; no one had made it breathe in his prose and poetry as Baudelaire had done.

Calasso has penned a book where the fantastic and the bizarre in all their connotations dovetail. It is vison from a fever, a strange state of affairs and the lodestar is one Charles Baudelaire. The book is a gallery or to borrow Baudelaire's famed dream, it is a brothel-museum where one can trod barefoot and indecently exposed and marvel at the amor fati, the crazed and brazen, where the chronicles of Manet or Ingres can astonish. Where humility leaves us weeping.

The sections on Baudelaire and Rimbaud were superior, a crackling mastery of modernity is on display. Calasso weaves and constructs, he teases us with a theory of allegory and flashes an homage to Baudelaire's embrace of definition. The sections on painting are the sinew of the book, but were less effective to my simple soul.

Calasso is always looking both forward and back, his erudition is breathtaking as is the pellucid prose. ( )