K. By Roberto Calasso Translated by Geoffrey Brock Knopf, 327 pp. $25 Buy this book Related: Wind-Down Bird New signals from Planet Murakami: Cat communication, fishy rain, and some moralizing Paul Lafarge reviews Haruki Murakami's Kafka On The Shore more books most popular most commented A G.I.'s Strange War Tale by Sean Gardiner Horacio Castellanos Moya Does the Twisted by Jed Lipinski The 2008 New Yorker Cartoon Standings by BRIAN PARKS Sasa Stanisic Turns Gruesome History Beautiful by Sidra Durst Rivka Galchen's Twisty Mistaken Identities by zach baron Trash Talking With Harvey Weinstein by Tony Ortega Coming and Then Licking It Up. Is This a Gay Thing? Savage Love by Dan Savage At Home With Competitive Swallowers Crazy Legs and Eater X by Andy Kropa Gene Simmons and the Whores He Admires La Dolce Musto by Michael Musto Columbia's Knotty Noose Problem by Graham Rayman The 'W.' Stands for 'War Criminal' (17) Nat Hentoff Scientology's Crushing Defeat (14) Tony Ortega Runnin' Scared: From Brooklyn, a Rap Campaign Against Tight Clothes (9) Runnin' Scared: Arcynta Ali Childs Runnin' Scared: The City Pitted Kids Against Artists in the East Village (6) Runnin' Scared: Chloé A. Hilliard Savage Love: My Boyfriend Almost Fathered a Lesbian Couple's Baby?!? (5) Savage Love: Dan Savage

K., Calasso's admirably nimble study of Kafka, is the fourth part of a work in progress. Previous installments charted the slaughter field of history (The Ruin of Kasch) and the Greek river and Indian ocean of myth (The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony and Ka, respectively). Motifs from these books resonate here: Kafka's world both precedes myth, going back to "the origin of the variants" that are the "lifeblood of every mythology," and postdates it, being the product of a world (ours) "where the unmanifest part—the greater part of what is—was increasingly being ignored or denied."

Calasso's career centers around an effort to redress that balance, to locate what vestige of the gods remains in the alien landscape. Traces of divinity turn up in surprising places. Tracking the "inexplicable, irrepressible cheerfulness that runs through the pages of The Missing Person" (a/k/a Amerika), Calasso calls the magnificent vision of the Theater of Oklahoma that concludes the book "the original scene of the [Hollywood] musical"—these films being the "one place in the twentieth century that came to represent mathematical, irresponsible happiness."