You can dip in at any point, and be carried along as in a lively cafe conversation — that is, if your friend happens to be a polymath with seemingly all of European literature (in the original languages), as well as Vedic writings, in his head, but whose flow of associations leaves you feeling not out of your depth, but smarter and better read.

Calasso is elliptical, allusive and dazzlingly eclectic. We might expect to encounter Darwin, dispensing the final cut to the animal past as human history, but not Beatrix Potter, for the further powerplay of swathing the animals in human garb and sentiment. Like Marsilio Ficino’s 15th-century attempt to revive Plato’s academy at Florence, The Celestial Hunter is ‘an initiation through the book’, speculative but capable of changing how you see things..

Calasso has a style that is at times obscure and impenetrable; unlike most writers of contemporary nonfiction, he never explicitly articulates his point—giving you the wild feeling of swimming in the open ocean. He likes to start his short sections with declarative, aphoristic sentences that give pause.

Calasso is famously serpentine in his style, approaching his subject through oblique digressions, obscure anecdotes, and constant locomotion. And so his narrative of how humans imitated predatory animals and internalized the symbolism of the hunt covers familiar archetypes—Orion in the night sky, Artemis the pure and ruthless—but also roams beyond Olympus into Egyptian, Vedic, and Persian sources.

... thought-provoking.