Customer Reviews

Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

This is an excellent example of thorough workmanship in literature. It makes Hindu literature nearly accessible, and if readers have a bit of background as well as some motivation this is a good book.

But, personally, while I find the material revealing, the presentation had a tone somewhere between academic and distantly lyrical. What I mean is that this book is meant to alter or rework religious texts into a digestible novel. Some of the stories stand on their own despite the sort-of objective perspective, others don't.

Further, I believe the book is mistitled. One part of the book does focus on Ka, the pregenetor in the Indian cosmology. Yet, throughout the book we find focus put upon the many avatars of Vishnu. Krishna, Buddha, and The White Horse (though I couldn't find where the author recognizes this fact) all fall in this category.

So, if you are interested in the stories of Indian Hinduism this book can extend your knowledge of the characters and give some of them life. Otherwise, it seems to be a well-written compilation work by an author not in the field of Hinduism.

this is a beautiful and profound book on the love affair of Indian culture with the mystery of consciousness where myths come alive as dreams that awaken us out of the mundane with the eerie sense that the ancient is with us, that we are the witness that has always been, the WHO or KA.

I tend to agree with the professional critics about Ka rather than some of the reviews readers have posted. I know something about Hinduism and Budddhism but not much. I still found this book a great read and really interesting. I was absorbed and moved by the translation of these stories. They are beautifully written and I got a lot out of reading them. I probably have more to learn and won't retain everything in the book that I read but it is a start with a very complex subject and one I don't believe could fully be understood by anyone. Ambiguity didn't ruin this book for me one bit.

I enjoyed this book as it brought all the characters in Indian mythology that we all know into one text, bringing the multitude of stories that criss cross through their lives into one work. This is a great book to read to get the gist of the Indian Hindu mythological characters and their lives and I believe it is also worthwhile as an introduction for anyone who has not read the Indian mythological stories before.

Having read and loved Calasso's "The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmonia", I grabbed this book the moment I saw it in a bookshop. I guess I should have known it would not be an easy book to read - after all, if I did not already have a solid background in Greek mythology before I read "The Marriage", I would have found it incomprehensible too. This is NOT the first book about Indian mythology to read, and perhaps not even the second or third book - you will be utterly confused unless you already have a very good foundation in Indian mythology AND some knowledge of Indian sacred writings. I was thoroughly disappointed, but perhaps that was my own fault for picking a book that went way over my head.

When I first saw this book on the library shelf, I was tempted to try it out then and there itself. I began leafing through the pages, and before I knew it, it was closing time for the library. I barely got enough time to get this issued and get it home to continue reading it.

To say it is a good book would be an understatement. To say it is an excellent book, written by an extremely erudite & imaginative author, would come close to doing justice to the efforts of Calasso.

I've done my share of reading of the Hindu mythology, and there were umpteen little stories, snippets and legends I came across for the first time in this book. The book is obviously written with long and careful research, deep into the ethereal nature of Hindu mythology, itself written & collated over thousands of millenia. The universe of literature that this book purports (and in fact, achieves) to cover consists of more than three-and-a-half-million Gods & Goddesses, all of whom have their own little story of origin, and importance, and appearance. When you add to that the fact that almost all of these dieties are also related to each other, in some way or the other, over time and space and worlds, the knots become so complicated to unravel that it takes an extremely skilled writer to see through the stories, and find clarity even in chaos.

I found the book quite entertaining, in terms of its (at times) lyrical content, lazy speed, and the introspection time that the (featured) Gods were given and what they introspect in that time. It's amazing how Calasso has been able to adroitly inter-twine the various legends together into a single book, with the chapters strung together, like pearls on a necklace.

For anyone with more than a fleeting interest in the Hindu mythology and the dieties that make up the Indian deity line-up, this is a must-read book. For the others, if imagination stimulates you, this is your cup-of-tea.

My score: a perfect 5 / 5

This Poetic novel is much like an extended _The Wasteland_ by T.S. Eliot. _Ka_ wraps the epics of the Indian subcontinent into a single unified whole. But by no means is this text meant to be read in a sitting--such beauty and wisdom is intense; reading it in long sittings actually gave me a headache! Nevertheless, this "flaw" of forcing the reader to put the text down is an integral part of the reading experience, as Calasso forces the reader to take in the stories piece by piece, like one would in listening to the performance of an epic by a singer-storyteller. One must remember that epics were performed in small pieces, each episode at an appropriate occasion (i.e., a story about a wedding at a wedding). Calasso's _Ka_ is not merely a book, but a simulation of the very experience of listening to and seeing an epic performed!