KA: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India
by CALASSO, Roberto
- Used
- very good
- Paperback
- first
- Condition
- Very Good /No Jacket
- Seller
-
Hadley, Massachusetts, United States
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
NY: Alfred A. Knopf. 1998. Advance Uncorrected Proof. Very Good in wrappers. Unless otherwise noted, our first editions are first printings. First Edition. Softcover. Very Good.
Reviews
On Apr 23 2014, a reader said:
KA, by the Italian writer Roberto Calasso, is a breathtaking and revelatory book. Calasso had hit the boards running in 1993 with THE MARRIAGE OF CADMUS AND HARMONY, a reimagining of the classic Greek myths; in KA, subtitled “Stories of the Mind and Gods of India,” he dives into the Indic myths and restores to them not only their brutal and erotic power but their mysterious, fluxive, almost vegetative qualities: the stories grow from each other as naturally as a flower from a stalk from a seed, and as startlingly, bafflingly, as the lotus stalk blooms from Vishnu’s belly. The collection of retold myths is usually a rote, schoolbookish genre: plots and characters but stale prose and no manna, no power, no emanations. Calasso is a full-flower European intellectual, and I’ll match any odds you offer that he is familiar with Heinrich Zimmer and Mircea Eliade and all the great twentieth-century mythographers, but that’s all behind the prose; he is also, here, an artist working solely, with an expressive and sensuous style, to render the tale for the tale’s sake: myth as a way of knowledge. He uses the tropical welter of the Vedic myths to envelop us; and when he arrives at the open field of the stories about the Buddha and Ananda he demonstrates how Buddhism grew out of Hinduism with a clarity we feel in our bones. Tim Parks has translated beautifully, not least in the playful cadences that close the book, that lull us back into story and wheel us back around to the book’s beginning. Calasso at the end evokes the hymn to Ka from the Rig Veda, with its teasing, lyric questions: “He who brought forth the great and lucid waters: Who shall we adore with our oblations?” KA—the Sanskrit word for “Who?”—is the book’s question; these stories, from the great and lucid waters of Indic myth, are its myriads of answer.
(Log in or Create an Account first!)
Details
- Seller
- Ken Lopez Bookseller, ABAA (US)
- Seller's Inventory #
- 700870
- Title
- KA: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India
- Author
- CALASSO, Roberto
- Format/Binding
- Softcover
- Book Condition
- Used - Very Good
- Jacket Condition
- No Jacket
- Edition
- First Edition
- Binding
- Paperback
- Publisher
- Alfred A. Knopf
- Place of Publication
- NY
- Date Published
- 1998
Terms of Sale
Ken Lopez Bookseller, ABAA
All books are First Editions or First American Editions in dust jackets unless otherwise noted and are returnable within 30 days.
About the Seller
Ken Lopez Bookseller, ABAA
Biblio member since 2005
Hadley, Massachusetts
About Ken Lopez Bookseller, ABAA
We deal in rare books, specializing in modern literary first editions. We regularly issue catalogs of Modern Literature and less regularly issue catalogs of Native American Literature, the Literature of the Vietnam War and the 1960s, and Nature Writing. Ken is a former President of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America. We maintain an office in Hadley, Massachusetts and welcome visitors by appointment. We are always interested in buying rare books, manuscripts, or related material in any of our areas of specialty and are happy to hear from anyone offering such items to us.
Glossary
Some terminology that may be used in this description includes:
- Uncorrected Proof
- An uncorrected proof is a printed copy of a book that needs to be reviewed for errors and corrections. They are released prior...
- Wrappers
- The paper covering on the outside of a paperback. Also see the entry for pictorial wraps, color illustrated coverings for...
- First Edition
- In book collecting, the first edition is the earliest published form of a book. A book may have more than one first edition in...