Kafka the Pagan?

Slate points out a unique review in The Weekly Standard of a new book about Kafka entitled simply “K”.

“A warm review of K., Roberto Calasso’s new book about Kafka, makes much of Calasso’s “neopaganism” (he salutes magic and idolatry) and claims that Calasso “might have been invented by a novelist or drafted by a filmmaker to embody the European Union’s dream of itself.”Calasso, an erudite polyglot author who has said that the gods of the ancient world are both “real and unreal,” criticizes atheism and explores Kafka’s neopagan side.” – Bidisha Banerjee, Slate

Here is a clip from the review itself:

“Roberto Calasso has written A book about Franz Kafka that concludes by celebrating the practice of magic and the worship of idols, calling for ‘an end to the atavistic struggle against the gods–a struggle that fails to understand that the singular is one modality of the plural, and the plural one way to catch a flashing glimpse of the veiled splendor.’ This is not the way books on the creator of Gregor Samsa are supposed to end–Kafka the neopagan? Kafka at Burning Man?–nor is this the way that a European intellectual is supposed to think. (Europe, we’re being told over and over, is secular to the core.)” – John Wilson, The Weekly Standard

Maybe Kafka’s power animal was the cockroach?

Tags: Neopaganism