Ka

Stories of the Mind and Gods of India

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by Roberto Calasso and Tim Parks

Random House, Inc

Due/Published October 1999, 464 pages, paper

ISBN 0679775471

"A giddy invasion of stories—brilliant, enigmatic, troubling, outrageous, erotic, beautiful." —The New York Times Book Review

"So brilliant that you can't look at it anymore—and you can't look at anything else. . . . No one will read it without reward."
—The Boston Globe

With the same narrative fecundity and imaginative sympathy he brought to his acclaimed retelling of the Greek myths, Roberto Calasso plunges Western readers into the mind of ancient India. He begins with a mystery: Why is the most important god in the Rg Veda, the oldest of India's sacred texts, known by a secret name—"Ka," or Who?
What ensues is not an explanation, but an unveiling. Here are the stories of the creation of mind and matter; of the origin of Death, of the first sexual union and the first parricide. We learn why Siva must carry his father's skull, why snakes have forked tongues, and why, as part of a certain sacrifice, the king's wife must copulate with a dead horse. A tour de force of scholarship and seduction, Ka is irresistible.

"Passage[s] of such ecstatic insight and cross-cultural synthesis—simply, of such beauty." —The New York Review of Books

"All is spectacle and delight, and tiny mirrors reflecting human foibles are set into the weave,turning this retelling into the stuff of literature." —The New Yorker

Review

Called revolutionary by some, Ka is a uniquely exceptional narration of the formation of the Indian mind. While the past few years have seen many books on the history of India, Roberto Calasso, author of the critically-acclaimed The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, brilliantly uses mythical stories to depict the mental world of India. Calasso has created a world that is suffuse with images and characters that are captivatingly strange and mysterious and it brilliantly evokes the power and drama of myth like few modern works have. Slowly, though the strange becomes familiar, as new and ever more fantastic stories are spun out, gods emerge, bizarre sacrifices are performed. Why must the king's wife copulate with a dead horse? How is man reduced to an eye in an ant's nest? Why must the road to higher consciousness pass through an erotic adventure. Rejecting our cravings to have the culture systematized and predigested for us, Calasso invites us to understand India on Indian terms (a rare feat), through Indian Images, through India itself.