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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Incredible for all interested in Hinduism, August 16, 2002
This review is from: Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India (Paperback)
I cannot understand why anyone would give this book a single star. Having grown up Hindu, I can say that Calasso has given me a retelling of stories from my childhood, and given my valuable insights into those stories. The book is as much a history as it is a novel. It is the history of Indian thought told as a story would be, and with each step Calasso gives us another beautiful conclusion or observation. If there was one part of the book that was flawed, it was the drawn out story of the horse sacrifice, but even there we see how much research Calasso has done. There are benefits to being somone in a culture and writing on it, but there are also benefits to being an outsider. Calasso is one of the best writers on the outside of India. Not only do we see the linkings of Hinduism, we see the linkings of Calasso's mind, and this linking of facts and memes is a major theme of the faith that Calasso presents. The way this book echoes itself is beautiful. In truth, as one critic said, nothing has come out of India that deals with Hinduism so wonderfully in recent years. This simply is the truth, and rather than an insult I think Hindus should read this book and accept the challenge to produce a better work.
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Oh, my, November 21, 2002
This review is from: Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India (Paperback)
Calasso's works tend to be illuminating and humbling in equal portions, and this is no exception. If you've read any of the ancient stories in more traditional forms -- Hamilton's mythology, or a translation of the Bhagvad-gita for example, you're in for a big surpise. Get ready. And if you think of yourself as reasonably well read, Calasso will make you feel illiterate. This man seems to have read, and digested everything. In this work, Calasso illustrates the religious thought of India through a retelling of many stories. It might be more fair to say reimaging, but I'd hate to mislead you into thinking this is some sort of postmodernist 'recontextualizing' of the stories. Calasso's not trying to subvert the stories, but rather to get inside them. The reader ends up with intuitions, and a sense of complex relationships, rather than a reductionist or reconstructed version of the tales. If you're more familiar with western traditions, I recommend "The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony" as an introduction to his technique. But if you're interested in the people and culture of India but have found the other works either too archaic or new-agey, this is a great introduction.
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15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not a beginner book, May 19, 2003
This review is from: Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India (Paperback)
Ka is well written and is a true pleasure to read. It brings out some of the lesser known mythological tales of India's heritage and is very narrative in its story telling, unlike many Indian authored books on the same subject, which are riddled with commentaries and sanskrit verses in between. This makes the book very readable indeed, which is an added benefit to some very enjoyable and enthralling tales. However, this is not a beginner book in Indian mythology. To make sense and perspective of the stories in this book, it is very useful to first have a clear idea of the present day view of many of these Gods and the rituals, and also understand India's heritage as being a mix of the Vedic Aryans and the Upanishadic Indians... or if you believe in the Aryan Invasion myth, the Vedic Aryans, period. This is a good book to read, but needs to have a pre-course work done to avoid drawing "incorrect" subjective judgments on Indian deities from this book alone.
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