Ka

Roberto Calasso

Roberto Calasso narrates the birth of one of the world's great cultures: the formation of the mind of India. He doesn't explain or describe this mental world - he regenerates it through its epic cyclical stories and customs, until we no longer need to define it for ourselves because we have come to know what it is. So: Who is Ka? And who is the immense eagle asking the question, filling the sky, elephant and giant turtle dwarfed in his claws? How can he be the child of a woman? Who are the tiny folk he eats? The first impact of Ka is one of tremendous strangeness, bewilderment, disorientation. How can a Western tradition which demands to identify a beginning and an end understand one that sees no beginning and no end, but only an eternal tangle? Slowly, though, the strange becomes familiar, as new and ever more fantastic stories are spun out, gods emerge, bizarre sacrifices are...

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