Myths, eagles and legends: get into the 'Ka'

Roberto Calasso is the presiding genius of contemporary Italian literature. Ka is the third volume, and the emotional and philosophical cornerstone, of his five-volume fictional project. Readers may remember The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (1994) as being a gloriously seductive meditation on the entire body of Greek mythology and The Ruin of Kasch (1996), which imaginatively recreated the emergence of modernity from the destruction of the past. Both of these novels of ideas may be remembered as being riveting and, at the same time, demanding.

Roberto Calasso is the presiding genius of contemporary Italian literature. Ka is the third volume, and the emotional and philosophical cornerstone, of his five-volume fictional project. Readers may remember The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (1994) as being a gloriously seductive meditation on the entire body of Greek mythology and The Ruin of Kasch (1996), which imaginatively recreated the emergence of modernity from the destruction of the past. Both of these novels of ideas may be remembered as being riveting and, at the same time, demanding.