Marginalia on Casanova, the first volume of the St. Orpheus Breviary, is Miklos Szentkuthys synthesis of 2,000 years of European culture. St. Orpheus is Szentkuthys Virgil, an omniscient, poet who guides us not through hell, but through all of recorded history, myth, religion, and literature, albeit reimagined as St. Orpheus metamorphosizes himself into kings, popes, saints, tyrants, and artists. At once pagan and Christian, Greek and Hebrew, Asian and European, St. Orpheus is a mosaic of history and mankind in one supra-person and veil, an
endless series of masks and personae, humanity in...