Word: calasso
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...first work translated into English, the brilliant Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, saw him marking out his territory as somewhere between the literary anthropology of Robert Graves’ classic The White Goddess and the mythology-blender of Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces. The Calasso of Literature and the Gods is a little closer to Goddess than Hero, as he attempts to trace through all of Western literature, from Homer to Nabokov, a phenomenon that he defines called “absolute literature.” Absolute literature is literature inspired by some sort...
...What Calasso did with Greek mythology in Cadmus and Harmony was a bit like what Blake did with the Bible in his poetry: breaking the old myths apart, reinterpreting them, and finding explanations for all the contradictions and holes in the different versions of the myths. While it is a great read that draws its power from a very genuine sense of awe and wonder, I don’t think anyone would mistake it for an accurate version of Greek mythology. It’s more like Calasso’s personal poetic riff on symbols established by Greek...
...third and central work of Calasso's five-book project about mythical and intellectual beginnings. The first book in the series was the critically and popularly acclaimed The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, which recounted with proper flair and fervor the entire chronology and theogeny of Greek and Roman mythology for over-stimulated postmodern audience. Next came The Ruin of Kasch, which told of how modern culture and ideas can spring from the complete decimation of a past culture. In Ka, Calasso tackles the myths of the Indian subcontinent and traces the theological origins of that culture from these stories...
...fascinating collection of stories at once comical, mysterious, unnerving and erotic, told by a brilliant modern narrator. The book actually reads like a post-modern Hindu campfire story. The fifteen sections of the book recount all the stories contained in the major theological and mythological texts of India, but Calasso does not assume any prior knowledge of the Rig-Veda, the Mahabharata or the like, nor does he linger on the stories' historical background. His versions of the great myths are fresh and exciting (if slightly bizarre and grotesque) fairy tales of a sort, not historical or ideological records...
...Roberto Calasso resists this temptation to "exoticise" or trivialize the stories through humor with triumphant results. Don't misunderstand--there is plenty of humor, horror and wonder about the stories is Calasso's writing; but these feelings spring from Calasso's treatment of the stories as texts to learn from, not to snicker pre-pubescently at. Even more interesting is his incorporation of Western texts and ideas into a decidedly Eastern way of thinking. Thus Proust becomes a Vedic prayer-chant master; the great creator-spirit Prajapat faces Kafka-esque dilemmas that lead him to be compared to The Trial...