La pluma de Simmons aquí, al igual que en la mayoría de sus novelas, es magnífica, haciendo soberbias descripciones de la ciudad de Calcuta al punto que te sientes capaz de oler, sentir, ver y escuchar lo mismo que el protagonista. Sin mencionar que también hay partes de la primera mitad que te mantienen bastante enganchado y te invitan a descubrir que se oculta tras el misterioso culto a Kali y el turbio destino del poeta. I nodded. The heat had caused a headache to start throbbing behind my eyes. "Abe, you've just spent time in the wrong cities," I said lightly. "Try spending a summer in North Philadelphia or on the Southside of Chicago where I grew up. That'll make Calcutta look like Fun City." Dan's first published story appeared on Feb. 15, 1982, the day his daughter, Jane Kathryn, was born. He's always attributed that coincidence to "helping in keeping things in perspective when it comes to the relative importance of writing and life."

Are we all illusions? Brief shadows thrown on a white wall for the shallow amusement of bored gods? Is this all?" Abe was in his cluttered office, alone, working on the autumn issue of Voices. The windows were open, but the air in the room was as stale and moist as the dead cigar that Abe was chewing on. "Don't go to Calcutta, Bobby," Abe said again. "Let someone else do it." Abe stared at me. "Uh-uh," he said. "No way. M. Das is dead. He died six or seven years ago. In 1970, I think." I am used to Americans and their reaction to our city. They will react in either one of two ways: they will find Calcutta ‘exotic’ and concentrate only on their tourist pleasures; or they will be immediately horrified, recoil, and seek to forget what they have seen and not understood. Yes, yes, the American psyche is as predictable as the sterile and vulnerable American digestive system when it encounters India.”It's an urban-fantasy horror novel with some genuinely freaky moments, made all the more freaky by their macabre banality. To become a member of the Kali cult, for instance, one need only bring a corpse to the first meeting. It's irrelevant how you get your corpse. You can kill it, dig it up, steal it, whatever works for you, but it makes for a frightening sequence, fraught with "what ifs?" and "holy shits!". And all of this is offered as a reflection of what humanity truly is, even when most of humanity is gleefully hiding its ugly nature behind a saccharine humanism. La novela narra la historia de Robert qué es contratado para ir a la ciudad de Calcuta en busca de un famoso poeta indio, viaje que realiza junto a su esposa y recién nacida hija, y en el que también descubrirá una serie de macabros sucesos en torno al culto a la diosa kali que cambiarán su vida y la de su familia para siempre. Everyone he encounters behaves strangely, and the closer he gets to the truth the darker and stranger things become. The fact that he decided to bring his wife and six month-old child in tow certainly doesn't help matters. Dark forces appear to be at play and Robert and his family are set for a hellish time in the days to come as events begin to spiral out of control. He was. He is. Not sentimental but optimistic." It was the same phrase I'd used many times to defend Tagore. Hell, it was the same phrase I'd used to defend my own work. Nope. That's about it. Of course there are only a few stanzas in that fragment," I said. "And it's a rough translation."

Whispers can still be heard, though, of the "Song of Kali", the condition of humanity dominated by hatred and violence, perfectly embodied, in the mind of the narrator, by the squalor and chaos of Calcutta. What an exceptional book within the horror genre - a true masterpiece and extremely hard to put down. Although Dan Simmons talks about many ancient practices of Hinduism that were rendered illegal by the insurgence of British humanitarian laws, the scope of this novel and its main focus go way beyond that. From the perspective of the Indian folklore and myths, he puts forth how the “age of Kali” (which is metaphorically synonymous to “the era of destruction”) has begun. Though the book is dark and disturbing at certain parts and the opinion of the protagonist, Luczak, is offensive towards the Hindu religion and Indian culture as a whole, the book was a good read. The main reason for this is the respect that the writer shows towards the Hindu beliefs by incorporating parts of the folklore into his storyline – the main twist was left unrevealed which may intrigue the readers enough to think about the possibility of supernatural interventions. Song of Kali took me by surprise. And it shouldn't as I know how talented an author Dan Simmons is. This is old school horror written by an author with real literary talent. What a debut! She patted the baby’s ruff of hair and handed her to me. I settled Victoria in the hollow of my shoulder and watched as Amrita walked to the edge of the pool and smoothed down her tan skirt. The light from the pool illuminated her sharp cheekbones from below. My wife is beautiful, I thought for the thousandth time since our wedding.After a couple of days of dead-end leads, an Indian couple is caught at the airport trying to take someone resembling Victoria out of the country. Robert and Amrita go to identify their child, but find that she is already dead.

Kolkata is a city of contradictions. One side of the road would show magnificent high rises while the other has shanties and hastily put together human habitations. You travel through roads where garbage is piled high and refuse floats through large bodies of water. Turn a bend in the road and you see a tree lined pavement, well cared for houses and apartments and the road will lead you to some of the swankiest shopping malls in town. There is a mix of the old and the new, the beautiful and the repulsive & the eye catching and the forgettable. Kolkata in short thus is a replica of any other large city in the world. Dan Simmons though paints a grim portrait of this town and calls it in so many words a nest of many evils.My last sight of Abe was of him standing there with his arm and hand extended, either in a half-wave or some mute gesture of tired resignation. I wasn't talking about the weather," said Abe. "Although it's the hottest, most humid, most miserable goddamn hellhole I've ever been in. Worse than Burma in '43. Worse than Singapore in typhoon weather. Jesus, it's worse than Washington in August. No, Bobby, I'm talking about the place, goddammit. There was something…something miasmal about that city. I've never been in a place that seemed as mean or shitty, and I've spent time in some of the great sewer cities of the world. Calcutta scared me, Bobby." Novela de terror y drama... o drama y terror. No sabría definir qué género termina teniendo mayor peso. Song of Kali" was a very interesting book. Set in the late 1970s Calcutta, it is a horror story centered around the Hindu goddess Kali. He's filling in as temporary assistant editor at Harper's," I said. "He wants the Calcutta article in by the October issue."

I found the claustrophobic, filthy and sinister atmosphere of Calcutta, well described. I could almost smell the city while reading. I felt the city’s humidity and the frenzy of all the unfortunate and fortunate people living there. Dan Simmons grew up in various cities and small towns in the Midwest, including Brimfield, Illinois, which was the source of his fictional "Elm Haven" in 1991's SUMMER OF NIGHT and 2002's A WINTER HAUNTING. Dan received a B.A. in English from Wabash College in 1970, winning a national Phi Beta Kappa Award during his senior year for excellence in fiction, journalism and art. Abe had a point. Not many people had heard of Robert C. Luczak in 1977, despite the fact that Winter Spirits had received half a column of review in the Times. Still, I hoped that what people—especially the few hundred people who counted— had heard was promising. " Harper's thought of me because of that piece I did in Voices last year," I said. "You know, the one on Bengali poetry. You said I spent too much time on Rabindranath Tagore."No." I blinked in surprise. Abe had traveled widely as a wire-service reporter before he wrote his first novel, but he rarely talked about those days. After he had accepted my Tagore piece, he idly mentioned that he once had spent nine months with Lord Mountbatten in Burma. His stories about his wire-service days were rare but invariably enjoyable. "Was it during the war?" I asked. There is also an undercurrent of despair at the Holocaust and nuclear destruction that somehow has also become attenuated - Rwanda and Srebenica have not normalised the horrors of the 1940s but, as the survivors of older horrors die of natural causes, modern small genocides seem more managable to liberals - if only the UN could get its act together. Such massacres are no longer placed in that category of all-encompassing global existential evil that excites hopelessness - like Calcutta does to Simmons' narrator. Realmente una lástima, una novela que tenía todos los elementos para ser una obra de primer nivel, pero que se ve arruinada por su flojo e innecesario tercer acto. A poisonous atmosphere," I said. It nettled me to be quizzed. "As from a swamp. Or any noxious influence. Probably comes from the Greek miainein, meaning ‘to pollute.'"