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.)

In most respects, it's true, Roberto Calasso appears to be perfectly cast as an exemplary representative of the European Mind. Presiding over Adelphi, the distinguished publishing house based in Milan, Calasso is a supremely cosmopolitan man of letters. He seems to have read everything, and usually in the original language--not only a dizzying range of European authors and the literature of classical Greece and Rome but also the canonical Sanskrit texts of ancient India--and he is himself a writer with a powerful, subtle intelligence and a seductive style. Dark-haired, hawk-nosed, infinitely urbane, he might have been invented by a novelist or drafted by a filmmaker to embody the European Union's dream of itself.