Grammars of Creation

Yale University Press, September 2002. Paper Back. New. The dust jacket says this book might be considered Steiner's magnum opus, and we don't doubt it; trouble is, it seems that all of his books somehow merit that description. Which of them lacks his breadth of literary and philosophical awareness, his intuition of the preciousness of great literature, the precariousness of its existence, and even more our ability to worthily comprehend it? More, his horror in the face of the obscenity of those who did acknowledge and comprehend it and yet simultaneously created a vast machinery of destruction of an entire people in the century just past? All these concerns are here again, as Steiner turns to the possibility of hope in what he feels is the twilight of Western civilization. Surveying the impulse of creation in Homer and Virgil, in Shakespeare and Dante, Coleridge and Dostoevsky and Joyce and Celan, he stubbornly clings to that hope, that humane and transcendent values will not be smothered, either by the ''art'' of ''soiled sheets and bisected calves... [or] a Duchamp urinal,'' on the one hand, or by a seductive scientific technocracy on the other. This is a dense book, but is not of that density that results from a writer's love of baroque verbiage; rather, it arises from a soul of formidable brilliance thinking ever-more deeply on the issues close to his heart, and approaching that place where ''grammars'' must be stretched to express realities beyond words. 344 pp.