The Unnamable Present

The present is difficult enough while it is happening, but Roberto Calasso makes the alarming case that it may also be difficult to name.

The Unnamable Present is a sharp, elegant, unsettling reflection on modernity, secular life, terrorism, technology, consumer culture, politics, and the strange spiritual vacancy of the contemporary world. Calasso writes like someone examining civilisation through smoked glass: calmly, beautifully, and with the faint implication that things have gone badly wrong in ways we have not yet understood.

This is not a cheerful book of solutions. It is more like a finely made intellectual weather report, noting the pressure drops, cultural tremors, and moral fog banks of the age. The modern world, in Calasso’s hands, appears efficient, connected, distracted, and oddly hollow, which is impressive considering how loudly it talks about itself.

There is a pleasing irony in the title. The present may be unnamable, but it still arrives neatly printed by Allen Lane, with an ISBN, a cover price, and all the usual apparatus of cultural respectability. Even the age of fragmentation, it seems, can be catalogued.

This as new copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books, is ideal for readers of philosophy, cultural criticism, modern thought, and anyone who enjoys books that do not so much explain the world as make it feel slightly more mysterious and much less innocent.

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