Literature and the Gods
By Roberto Calasso
Translated from the Italian by Tim Parks
Knopf, $22
ISBN 0375411380

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"The gods are fugitive guests of literature. They cross it with the trail of their names and are soon gone." So opens Roberto Calasso's story of the disappearance and reemergence of the gods in modern literature. "Every time the writer sets down a word," he continues, "he must fight to win [the gods] back."

To begin with, then, in Literature and the Gods, Calasso demands from his reader an imagination that will allow, without strict denominational fear of blaspheming, this concurrence between literature and supplication to the gods, and not merely of the Greek and Roman variety. For Calasso, a true appreciation of the intuitive brilliance of certain European writers -- especially the Symbolist poet Stephane Mallarme -- requires the invocation of a whole host of gods and theological concepts, from Sanskrit literature with names like Prajapati and ksaraty aksaram.

Calasso has every right to ask his reader to rise to this level of cross-cultural awareness, having composed two earlier books on the gods (The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, a magnificent re-orchestration of the Greek myths, and Ka, encompassing the dizzying pantheon of Indian lore). Readers also have a right to know how much Calasso expects from them in these lectures given at Oxford last May. He expects a lot, but the intellectual journey always feels more like an adventure than an esoteric detour.

Calasso treats the names Hoelderlin, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Proust, Nabokov with an easy grace, like old friends, or even houseguests. If some of these names are not so familiar to us, Calasso's way of invoking them (like gods daily prayed to) always feels like an invitation to dive into their work, never a reproach for not recognizing their significance right off the bat.

A surefire way to reap the pleasures of Calasso's essays is to think of them as "elbows" nudging you on every page to go to the library, to the website, or to the bookstore, to get better acquainted with those luminous names, which, for Calasso, are the indispensable heroes of the one form of spirituality we can all agree on: literature.

Michael Alec Rose is an associate professor at the Blair School of Music of Vanderbilt University.