And Madame de Sablé invented the review

A woman writes in a notebook.Getty Images

The origins of literary genres are often lost in the mists of time.

But this is not the case with the review, a minor genre of which we even know the exact date it was born.

Or, rather, Roberto Calasso knows it, who dedicates an essay to him in

(Anagrama, translation by Edgardo Dobry).

It is advisable to distinguish between criticism and reviews. The former seem to have higher flights while the reviews, with less pretense, are limited to presenting, at ground level, simply new works to the reading public. John Banville, for example, claims to have a great time closing a modest review and saying to himself "wow, wow, I've made a good, solid piece of carpentry." That would be indicating to us that brevity allows the person who writes a review to approach perfection, while a criticism, even if only because of its length or high pretensions, can be made untamed.

And that yes: the shadow of a suspicion always falls inevitably on any review. According to Banville, if you write it favorable it is interpreted as a product of the well-known network of friends, while if you load the book it is perceived as envy. And no one has yet found a way to abolish that shadow of suspicion that crosses every review, the genre that Calasso tells us was born on March 9, 1665 in Paris when the scientific journal

(later renamed the

published a short literary note - a model of all the reviews that followed - written by Madame de Sablé on a book that still enjoys undoubted prestige today, the

of La Rochefoucauld.

Madame de Sablé and the author of the

were friends and the review was previously passed on to La Rochefoucauld himself. There has surely never been such a highly praising draft in the history of reviews, but the praised one, who must have been in Babia that day or was scared by the words of his friend, censored nothing less than the best phrase of all and downgraded the strength of others in their supposed attempt to "improve" them.

The sarcastic Sainte-Beuve would comment two centuries later with his proverbial malice: “La Rochefoucauld, who had spoken so badly of men, reviews his own eulogy for a newspaper; he only removes what he dislikes ”. Indeed, if the note published by

is compared with the previous draft of Madame de Sablé, it is observed that in its eagerness to "improve" what was already excellent, La Rochefoucauld loaded the most memorable phrase of the review, the one that spectacularly opened the article: "It is a treatise on the mechanisms of the human heart, of which it can be said that they have remained ignored until now." Nothing more radical and daring, says Calasso, could have been said of the

, but the author of the same did not hesitate to cross out that opening. La Rochefoucauld was the first author in history to upload a review that was very favorable to him. As far as we know, his peculiar self-injury has not been much imitated afterwards.