“The whole of Vedic India was an attempt to think further,” writes Calasso. He demands no less from his readers.
An alternately illuminating and baffling exploration of the primary texts of Indian philosophy and religion.
Whether he’s dealing with Greek mythology (The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, 1993), Franz Kafka (K., 2006) or the French Symbolists (La Folie Baudelaire, 2012), Calasso is always concerned with the ways his subjects alter the consciousness of their times. His latest book gives him more than enough to work with: the Vedas, the ancient compilations of Sanskrit hymns, mythology and philosophy that are the only remaining artifacts of a lost world of ancient India, a civilization “in which the invisible prevailed over the visible.” Millennia before Descartes, the Vedic authors and poets were fully aware of mankind as the thinking animal. “For the Vedic people,” writes Calasso, “everything came from consciousness, in the sense of pure awareness devoid of any other attribute.” The author pursues his own quest for enlightenment by questioning, treading carefully and humbling himself before a body of knowledge that has not always been well-served by his Western predecessors. (“Is it possible to hold that ‘our way of thinking’ is so barren and desolate that it doesn’t embrace, at least to some extent, thinking in images?”) He’s more interesting exploring this world than interpreting its texts; he tends to go off into the ether when in expository mode, and his thoughts don’t always naturally evolve. He’s more eloquent when he’s examining how this old world informs our concepts of sacrifice and the morality of killing and what the loss of transcendence means to modern life. He asks, in the end, whether religion has been adequately replaced by a “secularized society that can no longer see nature or any other power beyond itself and believes it is itself the answer for everything.”
“The whole of Vedic India was an attempt to think further,” writes Calasso. He demands no less from his readers.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-18231-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
An erudite and artful, though frustratingly restrained, look at Old Testament stories.
The Book of Genesis as imagined by a veteran voice of underground comics.
R. Crumb’s pass at the opening chapters of the Bible isn’t nearly the act of heresy the comic artist’s reputation might suggest. In fact, the creator of Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural is fastidiously respectful. Crumb took pains to preserve every word of Genesis—drawing from numerous source texts, but mainly Robert Alter’s translation, The Five Books of Moses (2004)—and he clearly did his homework on the clothing, shelter and landscapes that surrounded Noah, Abraham and Isaac. This dedication to faithful representation makes the book, as Crumb writes in his introduction, a “straight illustration job, with no intention to ridicule or make visual jokes.” But his efforts are in their own way irreverent, and Crumb feels no particular need to deify even the most divine characters. God Himself is not much taller than Adam and Eve, and instead of omnisciently imparting orders and judgment He stands beside them in Eden, speaking to them directly. Jacob wrestles not with an angel, as is so often depicted in paintings, but with a man who looks not much different from himself. The women are uniformly Crumbian, voluptuous Earth goddesses who are both sexualized and strong-willed. (The endnotes offer a close study of the kinds of power women wielded in Genesis.) The downside of fitting all the text in is that many pages are packed tight with small panels, and too rarely—as with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah—does Crumb expand his lens and treat signature events dramatically. Even the Flood is fairly restrained, though the exodus of the animals from the Ark is beautifully detailed. The author’s respect for Genesis is admirable, but it may leave readers wishing he had taken a few more chances with his interpretation, as when he draws the serpent in the Garden of Eden as a provocative half-man/half-lizard. On the whole, though, the book is largely a tribute to Crumb’s immense talents as a draftsman and stubborn adherence to the script.
An erudite and artful, though frustratingly restrained, look at Old Testament stories.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-393-06102-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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