What do you think?
Rate this book
Mount Analogue
In this novel/allegory the narrator/author sets sail in the yacht Impossible to search for Mount Analogue, the geographically located, albeit hidden, peak that reaches inexorably toward heaven. Daumal's symbolic mountain represents a way to truth that "cannot not exist," and his classic allegory of man's search for himself embraces the certainty that one can know and conquer one's own reality.
120 pages, Paperback
First published April 11, 1952
About the author
René Daumal
66 books174 followersRené Daumal was a French spiritual surrealist writer and poet. He was born in Boulzicourt, Ardennes, France.
In his late teens his avant-garde poetry was published in France's leading journals, and in his early twenties, although courted by André Breton co-founded, as a counter to Surrealism and Dada, a literary journal, "Le Grand Jeu" with three friends, collectively known as the Simplists, including poet Roger Gilbert-Lecomte . He is known best in the U.S. for two novels A Night of Serious Drinking and the allegorical novel Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing both based upon his friendship with Alexander de Salzmann, a pupil of G. I. Gurdjieff.
Daumal was self-taught in the Sanskrit language and translated some of the Tripitaka Buddhist canon into the French language, as well as translating the literature of the Japanese Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki into French.
He married Vera Milanova, the former wife of the poet Hendrik Kramer; after Daumal's death, she married the landscape architect Russell Page.
Daumal's sudden and premature death of tuberculosis on 21 May 1944 in Paris may have been hastened by youthful experiments with drugs and psychoactive chemicals, including carbon tetrachloride. He died leaving his novel Mount Analogue unfinished, having worked on it until the day of his death.
The motion picture The Holy Mountain by Alejandro Jodorowsky is based largely on Daumal's Mount Analogue.
William Walsh, an English poet, was a personal friend of Daumal and performed a radio presentation of Mount Analogue later in his life.
In his late teens his avant-garde poetry was published in France's leading journals, and in his early twenties, although courted by André Breton co-founded, as a counter to Surrealism and Dada, a literary journal, "Le Grand Jeu" with three friends, collectively known as the Simplists, including poet Roger Gilbert-Lecomte . He is known best in the U.S. for two novels A Night of Serious Drinking and the allegorical novel Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing both based upon his friendship with Alexander de Salzmann, a pupil of G. I. Gurdjieff.
Daumal was self-taught in the Sanskrit language and translated some of the Tripitaka Buddhist canon into the French language, as well as translating the literature of the Japanese Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki into French.
He married Vera Milanova, the former wife of the poet Hendrik Kramer; after Daumal's death, she married the landscape architect Russell Page.
Daumal's sudden and premature death of tuberculosis on 21 May 1944 in Paris may have been hastened by youthful experiments with drugs and psychoactive chemicals, including carbon tetrachloride. He died leaving his novel Mount Analogue unfinished, having worked on it until the day of his death.
The motion picture The Holy Mountain by Alejandro Jodorowsky is based largely on Daumal's Mount Analogue.
William Walsh, an English poet, was a personal friend of Daumal and performed a radio presentation of Mount Analogue later in his life.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 273 reviews
November 8, 2020
In the crowded physical world, there’s no place for mystical visionaries so they try to find their place in their own inner world…
Mount Analogue is an allegory of a spiritual voyage – the journey to reach the innermost summit within one’s own soul…
Without mystics the world would have been a flat and dull place.
And what defines the scale of the ultimate symbolic mountain – the one I propose to call Mount Analogue – is its inaccessibility to ordinary human approaches.
Mount Analogue is an allegory of a spiritual voyage – the journey to reach the innermost summit within one’s own soul…
The only admissible hypothesis is that the “shell of curvature” which surrounds the island is not absolutely impenetrable – that is, not always, not everywhere, and not for everyone. At a certain moment and in a certain place, certain persons (those who know how and wish to do so) can enter.
Without mystics the world would have been a flat and dull place.
April 25, 2012
It's a miracle that this book even exists. A book we were never meant to have, existing only in myth. A fever of a dream, but with all the details intact, specific, and so real. Like ending up in a dream without leaving the real world behind, both in terms of the trivialities of living as well as the logic that never approaches dream logic. An amalgamation of science, philosophy, myth, humor, and clear thinking, yes with the translucent, almost invisible, clarity of a 'paradam' that suddenly bends your thinking around its curvature. A 'paradam' shift. This book was already written from another world, no wonder Daumal died mid-sentence. No wonder! He was a dead man when he began, only gracing us with a few words from the other side. And how fitting! This story of a journey to the other side, a journey that never reaches its destination because its author, having reached it, cannot come back to tell us but a few details that might lead us there. An impossible journey. (Mount Analogue is analogous of itself, without ever being self-reflexive, without even knowing its antecedent). The unknown, like a dagger in the known, is deceptively accessible. Nevertheless, Daumal prepares the way, like the campers before him. In Daumal's world, the mystery of the unknown is more real than the reality of the world, so that our reality is but a dream within it. It's a transcendence into specificity. When we look back from the other world, we'll see but a vagueness reminiscent of lives half-lived in the fog that hovers in the foothills.
PS - reading some of the other reviews, I was a little annoyed that a few people had mentioned that this was surrealism. No it's not! People like to repeat what other people say without really evaluating it. Why would Daumal delve into surrealism when he can end up in the ideal territory of surrealism without ever leaving the real? That is what Daumal does, and that is why it is brilliant beyond anything I've ever imagined could be written. One logical step at a time, is how Daumal leads us up the mountain.
PS - reading some of the other reviews, I was a little annoyed that a few people had mentioned that this was surrealism. No it's not! People like to repeat what other people say without really evaluating it. Why would Daumal delve into surrealism when he can end up in the ideal territory of surrealism without ever leaving the real? That is what Daumal does, and that is why it is brilliant beyond anything I've ever imagined could be written. One logical step at a time, is how Daumal leads us up the mountain.
October 11, 2016
I am convinced that some books have a specific time in the life of a reader. Once that time is gone, they loose their effect. I have been meaning to procure this book since long, owing to my early interests in mystical/weird stories that aim to incorporate everything under the sun. Hell, I was even trying to write one of my own. This was back in 2006-07, when fresh out of college, I used to spend considerable time in libraries, bookshops, among roadside vendors and spent hours on the internet searching for info on obscure books. I responded enthusiastically to Borges every time I read the intro to The Book of Imaginary Beings, a book that was always by my bedside: "there is great pleasure in out-of-date erudition".
I particularly remember an old man (lovingly called Thatha) who had, or probably still has, a roadside bookshop near Luz corner in Chennai. He was a simple man whose cloths were generally soiled by sitting in dirt for long, but he was a revered figure. I couldn't communicate with him much, apart from asking him for a book or bargaining for a suitable price, because of my inability to speak in Tamil. I had heard that he came to Chennai as a helper to a military officer in the year 1948. He had acted in few films. He was a book tracker of sorts and had acquired a hero-like figure among the reading community in Mylapore area. He had helped me procure Mercea Eliade's Two Strange Tales, and a book on an encounter between Hermann Hesse and Carl Jung (it was in poor condition and I couldn't save it from perishing) along with an introductory book on Gurdjieff.
Those books were okay. And as I remember Thatha from a far-off vantage point it appears like a dream to me. His shop, the streets of Mylapore, and some such places where I had the habit of loitering are the legends I have formed in my mind about my early reading life. The books I read, and what I understood from them, was hardly as important as the fantasy of that time and place, a city which Madame Blavatsky thought well-suited to establish the theosophical society. It was as if I had, very briefly, escaped the gravity of the everyday life. I remember having pestered Thatha to help me find Mount Analogue, but he couldn't.
Now that the book has finally arrived it seems like a very pompous exercise. It is the basis for Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain (a film that baffled and startled me). But thankfully the book is comprehensible. A group of eight people go in search for a mythical mountain (the highest there is) that remains invisible to the naked eye (an inspiration for the island in the TV series LOST?). They take a boat journey, and their talks are singularly focused on self-indulgent intellectualism, filled with pseudo-theories. They all look like caricatures or stock-characters. One character believes in something and personifies that belief, gets almost reduced to it. Second has the sole job of countering the former's belief. If a character is shown in great misery, it is because he is trying to solve complex optical problems. That makes you smile because you find it cute. Wasn't there pleasure to be had in such writing?
Turns out that there is a flourishing community at base of the mountain, with a currency of its own, altered religious practices, its own understanding of law and order, linguistic and social variations. The peak remains elusive and difficult to access. It symbolizes a spiritual experience. Everyone can start at the base (ground zero) but very few can reach the peak. It also helps to know that Rene Daumal's close friend was a student of Gurdjieff (whose mystic teachings may have fueled the narrative).
The tension in the story comes from episodes like these:
"And what if someone does not manage to pay his debts?" Arther Beaver had asked.
"When you raise chicks," he was told, "You advance them the grain which, when they become hens, they will repay you in eggs. But when a young hen doesn't lay when it matures, what becomes of it?"
And each of us had swallowed his saliva in silence.
Isn't it lovely!? The ridiculous cliche of swallowing one's saliva to show fear or apprehension is almost dead now. This 50's novel is a relic that holds such nuggets. And they work for a story like this. Umberto Eco wrote that when he tried to remove all the unnecessary words or expressions from a Dumas novel to make it slicker for his translation it had lost its effect. And to some extend, it seems true.
It is a sad novel after all, ending abruptly because the writer died prematurely. The final pages are about the group's repeated attempts to reach the peak, and how their struggle is thwarted by natural calamities and the authority, with their imposition of curious rules. I was at my most attentive near the end. Because here we are beginning to see the bravery of Daumal's design. Did he plan the novel such that the group would never get to reach the peak? That would certainly have symbolic interpretations. But we can only guess.
An inventive book, it dares to create its own reality. We will never know whether Daumal was another Francis Bacon writing his Novum Organum, convinced that he had hit the right notes and now had answers for us all, or someone who was ultimately planning to ridicule the whole ordeal.
That, dear friends, will forever remain a mystery and we all swallow our saliva in silence.
I particularly remember an old man (lovingly called Thatha) who had, or probably still has, a roadside bookshop near Luz corner in Chennai. He was a simple man whose cloths were generally soiled by sitting in dirt for long, but he was a revered figure. I couldn't communicate with him much, apart from asking him for a book or bargaining for a suitable price, because of my inability to speak in Tamil. I had heard that he came to Chennai as a helper to a military officer in the year 1948. He had acted in few films. He was a book tracker of sorts and had acquired a hero-like figure among the reading community in Mylapore area. He had helped me procure Mercea Eliade's Two Strange Tales, and a book on an encounter between Hermann Hesse and Carl Jung (it was in poor condition and I couldn't save it from perishing) along with an introductory book on Gurdjieff.
Those books were okay. And as I remember Thatha from a far-off vantage point it appears like a dream to me. His shop, the streets of Mylapore, and some such places where I had the habit of loitering are the legends I have formed in my mind about my early reading life. The books I read, and what I understood from them, was hardly as important as the fantasy of that time and place, a city which Madame Blavatsky thought well-suited to establish the theosophical society. It was as if I had, very briefly, escaped the gravity of the everyday life. I remember having pestered Thatha to help me find Mount Analogue, but he couldn't.
Now that the book has finally arrived it seems like a very pompous exercise. It is the basis for Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain (a film that baffled and startled me). But thankfully the book is comprehensible. A group of eight people go in search for a mythical mountain (the highest there is) that remains invisible to the naked eye (an inspiration for the island in the TV series LOST?). They take a boat journey, and their talks are singularly focused on self-indulgent intellectualism, filled with pseudo-theories. They all look like caricatures or stock-characters. One character believes in something and personifies that belief, gets almost reduced to it. Second has the sole job of countering the former's belief. If a character is shown in great misery, it is because he is trying to solve complex optical problems. That makes you smile because you find it cute. Wasn't there pleasure to be had in such writing?
Turns out that there is a flourishing community at base of the mountain, with a currency of its own, altered religious practices, its own understanding of law and order, linguistic and social variations. The peak remains elusive and difficult to access. It symbolizes a spiritual experience. Everyone can start at the base (ground zero) but very few can reach the peak. It also helps to know that Rene Daumal's close friend was a student of Gurdjieff (whose mystic teachings may have fueled the narrative).
The tension in the story comes from episodes like these:
"And what if someone does not manage to pay his debts?" Arther Beaver had asked.
"When you raise chicks," he was told, "You advance them the grain which, when they become hens, they will repay you in eggs. But when a young hen doesn't lay when it matures, what becomes of it?"
And each of us had swallowed his saliva in silence.
Isn't it lovely!? The ridiculous cliche of swallowing one's saliva to show fear or apprehension is almost dead now. This 50's novel is a relic that holds such nuggets. And they work for a story like this. Umberto Eco wrote that when he tried to remove all the unnecessary words or expressions from a Dumas novel to make it slicker for his translation it had lost its effect. And to some extend, it seems true.
It is a sad novel after all, ending abruptly because the writer died prematurely. The final pages are about the group's repeated attempts to reach the peak, and how their struggle is thwarted by natural calamities and the authority, with their imposition of curious rules. I was at my most attentive near the end. Because here we are beginning to see the bravery of Daumal's design. Did he plan the novel such that the group would never get to reach the peak? That would certainly have symbolic interpretations. But we can only guess.
An inventive book, it dares to create its own reality. We will never know whether Daumal was another Francis Bacon writing his Novum Organum, convinced that he had hit the right notes and now had answers for us all, or someone who was ultimately planning to ridicule the whole ordeal.
That, dear friends, will forever remain a mystery and we all swallow our saliva in silence.
June 27, 2023
Mount Analogue may be the book that broke this reviewer’s back. What to say of it, but that it’s brief – tragically brief, given Daumal must have known he was racing the clock – and immense? And in fact, its brief immensity is almost fitting, because (if not for a few nods by the narrator to a known future early on, undermined in any case by the switch to a diarist’s present tense in Chapter 4) what better way for this impossible adventure to end than in mid-sentence, on the slopes of the mountain? That said, I (and, I’m sure, most of Daumal’s readers) would have loved to see beyond the foothills, and when I first realised I’d see no further I was near inconsolable; on reaching the last line I turned to the first and began again. Yet even a second reading has little clarified my impressions – ironic, given Daumal’s own narrative is nothing if not clear. And it’s this clarity – fearless, given the esoteric nature of the topics it gazes upon – that, paradoxically, imparts to Mount Analogue its near-endless seeming mystical/mysterious power.
Point 1, then: Mount Analogue describes a spiritual quest, but one which proceeds by scientific – or quasi-scientific – deduction. This science, or quasi-science, abounding in paradox, provides thrills and high entertainment thanks to its practitioner’s “methodological principal, which consists of assuming the problem solved and deducing from this solution all the consequences that flow logically from it.” Thus is the absurdity of a mountain higher than Everest, which has never appeared on any map, explained by the curvature of space and light, which render it invisible to all except those approaching from the west at sunset. And when the crew of the Impossible make that approach, in a bravura use of white space, Daumal simply starts a new chapter:
To me, this is one of many small miracles in this small miracle of a book, which I first heard of 10-15 years ago; which I sought – not urgently but steadily, almost subconsciously – those several years; and to which, now that I’ve found it (six Australian dollars on a dusty Sydney shelf), I defer as to a literary/spiritual cornerstone the likes of Hesse’s Journey to the East, Kafka’s The Castle or the best of Poe’s tales, which in one sense – the literary – seem Daumal’s clear forerunners, yet in another sense – the spiritual – seem hardly related at all. Point 2: Daumal, on the strength of these 70 tantalising, frustrating, unresolved pages, is an idol.
Point 3: Mount Analogue, mysterious as it is, by defining both its protagonist’s quest and its author’s, contains the means to its own solution. Or might have done, if it were finished. In any case, it makes sense, plainly and openly, while attempting to plumb the deepest mysteries of life and of art.
If I’ve said little here, if what I’ve said is confused, it’s because my view of my own Mount Analogue obscures my view of others’. But that view – mine, my own quest – is, for now, all-important. As Daumal’s narrator says (when the members of his expedition consider postponing their ascent of the mountain in order to broaden their fields of knowledge in the town below), there’s a time to nail “that nasty owl of intellectual cupidity” to the door. Others (Jimmy, Eddie, Nate) have written here, eloquently, of Daumal’s masterpiece. My Overlook Press edition includes a 17-page introduction by a scholar (Kathleen Ferrick Rosenblatt) far more knowledgeable than I am. All I can add is that it’s for real, this Mount Analogue thing: if a book is an engine for igniting sparks, it’s incendiary. Leave your owl at the door.
Point 1, then: Mount Analogue describes a spiritual quest, but one which proceeds by scientific – or quasi-scientific – deduction. This science, or quasi-science, abounding in paradox, provides thrills and high entertainment thanks to its practitioner’s “methodological principal, which consists of assuming the problem solved and deducing from this solution all the consequences that flow logically from it.” Thus is the absurdity of a mountain higher than Everest, which has never appeared on any map, explained by the curvature of space and light, which render it invisible to all except those approaching from the west at sunset. And when the crew of the Impossible make that approach, in a bravura use of white space, Daumal simply starts a new chapter:
A long wait for the unknown dampens the force of surprise.
To me, this is one of many small miracles in this small miracle of a book, which I first heard of 10-15 years ago; which I sought – not urgently but steadily, almost subconsciously – those several years; and to which, now that I’ve found it (six Australian dollars on a dusty Sydney shelf), I defer as to a literary/spiritual cornerstone the likes of Hesse’s Journey to the East, Kafka’s The Castle or the best of Poe’s tales, which in one sense – the literary – seem Daumal’s clear forerunners, yet in another sense – the spiritual – seem hardly related at all. Point 2: Daumal, on the strength of these 70 tantalising, frustrating, unresolved pages, is an idol.
The different branches of the symbolic had been my favorite study for a long time – I naively believed that I understood something about the subject; furthermore, as a mountaineer I had a passionate love of the mountains. The consequence of these two very different kinds of interest in the same subject, mountains, had colored certain passages of my article with a definite lyricism. (Such conjunctions, incongruous as they may seem, play a large part in the genesis of what is called poetry. I offer this remark as a suggestion to critics and aestheticians attempting to shed light on the depths of this mysterious language.)
Point 3: Mount Analogue, mysterious as it is, by defining both its protagonist’s quest and its author’s, contains the means to its own solution. Or might have done, if it were finished. In any case, it makes sense, plainly and openly, while attempting to plumb the deepest mysteries of life and of art.
If I’ve said little here, if what I’ve said is confused, it’s because my view of my own Mount Analogue obscures my view of others’. But that view – mine, my own quest – is, for now, all-important. As Daumal’s narrator says (when the members of his expedition consider postponing their ascent of the mountain in order to broaden their fields of knowledge in the town below), there’s a time to nail “that nasty owl of intellectual cupidity” to the door. Others (Jimmy, Eddie, Nate) have written here, eloquently, of Daumal’s masterpiece. My Overlook Press edition includes a 17-page introduction by a scholar (Kathleen Ferrick Rosenblatt) far more knowledgeable than I am. All I can add is that it’s for real, this Mount Analogue thing: if a book is an engine for igniting sparks, it’s incendiary. Leave your owl at the door.
June 15, 2020
Ένας παταφυσικός σουρεαλιστής που εμπνεύστηκε από ανατολικές μυστικιστικές φιλοσοφίες γράφει ένα βιβλίο για ένα υποθετικό βουνό, το όρος Ανάλογο, το οποίο αποτελεί τον σύνδεσμο ανάμεσα στον ουρανό και τη γη. Με κλονισμένη την υγεία του από τη χρήση ναρκωτικών και τη φυματίωση, ο René Daumal, ο συγγραφέας αυτού του παράξενου εσωτεριστικού κειμένου, πεθαίνει σε ηλικία μόλις 36 ετών, στα 1944, στο Παρίσι. Το έργο θα απομείνει μισοτελειωμένο και είναι πολύ κρίμα, κυρίως γιατί είναι γραμμένο σαν παραβολή, δ��νει την αίσθηση μιας περιπέτειας που θυμίζει κάτι από τα απίθανα εξερευνητικά ταξίδια του Ιουλίου Βερν.
Μπορεί οι ιδέες του Daumal να μη μου προσέφεραν κάτι ιδιαίτερο, κυρίως γιατί πολλές από τις εσωτεριστικές, θεοσοφικές, μυστικιστικές φιλοσοφίες έχουν ως φορέα κάποιον γκουρού, στην προκειμένη περίπτωση υπάρχουν επιρροές από τις διδασκαλίες κάποιου "τρεχαγύρευε" Georges Gurdjieff, και πάντα ήμουν επιφυλακτική με τις αυθεντίες που μπορούν να σου αποκαλύψουν τα μυστήρια του σύμπαντος επί πληρωμή (σε μετρητά - επιταγές δε δεχόμεθα).
Ωστόσο πίσω από τις ιδέες αυτές υπάρχει ένας νους γεμάτος δίψα για γνώση, μια καρδιά γεμάτη από αγάπη και σε τελική ανάλυση σε αυτό το έργο ο Daumal επιχειρεί να περιγράψει μια πνευματική ανάβαση με τρόπο εξαιρετικά γοητευτικό και ενδιαφέροντα. Το κείμενό του δεν το βαραίνουν άσκοπες θεωρητικολογίες. Γιατί το βουνό Ανάλογο φαίνεται πως υπάρχει (και σε αυτό ζουν και μονόκεροι). Και ο Theodore, ο αφηγητής της ιστορίας συμμετέχει σε μια εξερευνητική αποστολή προκειμένου να ανακαλύψει τι κρύβεται στην κορυφή του.
Όλα ξεκινούν από ένα άρθρο του Theodore στο οποίο αναπτύσσει την εξής θεωρία:
"Στο άρθρο μου υποστήριζα πως στη μυθολογική παράδοση, το Βουνό αποτελεί το σύνδεσμο ανάμεσα στη Γη και τον Ουρανό. Η υψηλότερη κορυφή του αγγίζει τη σφαίρα της αιωνιότητας και η βάση του μέσα από τους πρόποδές του καταλήγει στον κόσμο των θνητών. Είναι το μονοπάτι μέσω του οποίου η ανθρωπότητα μπορεί να ανυψωθεί ως το θείο και το θείο να αποκαλυφθεί στην ανθρωπότητα."
Η θεωρία του πως ένα τέτοιο βουνό υπάρχει γεωγραφικά είναι η αιτία που ένας εκκεντρικός εφευρέτης, γκουρού, αλπινιστής, ο Pierre Sogol - το επώνυμό του, η πιο σωστά το ψευδώνυμό του, αποτελεί αναγραμματισμό της λέξης logos (Λόγος) - θα τον προσεγγίσει και θα οργανώσει μια εξερευνητική αποστολή η οποία ξεκινάει με δώδεκα υποψήφιους από τους οποίους θα καταλήξουν τελικά να ταξιδέψουν οι οκτώ.
Δυστυχώς το ταξίδι τους σε έναν ονειρεμένο κόσμο, όπου διέπεται από τους δικούς του ιδιότυπους φυσικούς νόμος και στους πρόποδες του οποίου ζουν αρμονικά άνθρωποι όλων των φυλών, εθνών και εποχών, ανάμεσα σε παράξενα φυτά και ζώα, σχηματίζοντας κοινωνίες που έχουν δομές παρόμοιες με εκείνες της προβιομηχανικής εποχής, με μια ανώτερη ιεραρχία βουνίσιων οδηγών κι έναν σπάνιο κρύσταλλο που ονομάζεται peradam και αποτελεί ό,τι και ο χρυσός στον υπόλοιπο κόσμο, δυστυχώς αυτό το ταξίδι θα διακοπεί στα μισά του πέμπτου κεφαλαίου. Μόλις στην αρχή της ανάβασης στο Όρος Ανάλογο.
Βέβαια, τουλάχιστον στην έκδοση που διάβασα δίνει πληροφορίες για το πώς θα εξελισσόταν η ιστορία και ποιο θα ήταν το τέλος της. Ο συγγραφέας σχεδίαζε να γράψει επτά συνολικά κεφάλαια και μέσα από αυτά να αποκαλύψει όσα κρύβονται στη μυστηριώδη κορυφή:
.
Μπορεί οι ιδέες του Daumal να μη μου προσέφεραν κάτι ιδιαίτερο, κυρίως γιατί πολλές από τις εσωτεριστικές, θεοσοφικές, μυστικιστικές φιλοσοφίες έχουν ως φορέα κάποιον γκουρού, στην προκειμένη περίπτωση υπάρχουν επιρροές από τις διδασκαλίες κάποιου "τρεχαγύρευε" Georges Gurdjieff, και πάντα ήμουν επιφυλακτική με τις αυθεντίες που μπορούν να σου αποκαλύψουν τα μυστήρια του σύμπαντος επί πληρωμή (σε μετρητά - επιταγές δε δεχόμεθα).
Ωστόσο πίσω από τις ιδέες αυτές υπάρχει ένας νους γεμάτος δίψα για γνώση, μια καρδιά γεμάτη από αγάπη και σε τελική ανάλυση σε αυτό το έργο ο Daumal επιχειρεί να περιγράψει μια πνευματική ανάβαση με τρόπο εξαιρετικά γοητευτικό και ενδιαφέροντα. Το κείμενό του δεν το βαραίνουν άσκοπες θεωρητικολογίες. Γιατί το βουνό Ανάλογο φαίνεται πως υπάρχει (και σε αυτό ζουν και μονόκεροι). Και ο Theodore, ο αφηγητής της ιστορίας συμμετέχει σε μια εξερευνητική αποστολή προκειμένου να ανακαλύψει τι κρύβεται στην κορυφή του.
Όλα ξεκινούν από ένα άρθρο του Theodore στο οποίο αναπτύσσει την εξής θεωρία:
"Στο άρθρο μου υποστήριζα πως στη μυθολογική παράδοση, το Βουνό αποτελεί το σύνδεσμο ανάμεσα στη Γη και τον Ουρανό. Η υψηλότερη κορυφή του αγγίζει τη σφαίρα της αιωνιότητας και η βάση του μέσα από τους πρόποδές του καταλήγει στον κόσμο των θνητών. Είναι το μονοπάτι μέσω του οποίου η ανθρωπότητα μπορεί να ανυψωθεί ως το θείο και το θείο να αποκαλυφθεί στην ανθρωπότητα."
Η θεωρία του πως ένα τέτοιο βουνό υπάρχει γεωγραφικά είναι η αιτία που ένας εκκεντρικός εφευρέτης, γκουρού, αλπινιστής, ο Pierre Sogol - το επώνυμό του, η πιο σωστά το ψευδώνυμό του, αποτελεί αναγραμματισμό της λέξης logos (Λόγος) - θα τον προσεγγίσει και θα οργανώσει μια εξερευνητική αποστολή η οποία ξεκινάει με δώδεκα υποψήφιους από τους οποίους θα καταλήξουν τελικά να ταξιδέψουν οι οκτώ.
Δυστυχώς το ταξίδι τους σε έναν ονειρεμένο κόσμο, όπου διέπεται από τους δικούς του ιδιότυπους φυσικούς νόμος και στους πρόποδες του οποίου ζουν αρμονικά άνθρωποι όλων των φυλών, εθνών και εποχών, ανάμεσα σε παράξενα φυτά και ζώα, σχηματίζοντας κοινωνίες που έχουν δομές παρόμοιες με εκείνες της προβιομηχανικής εποχής, με μια ανώτερη ιεραρχία βουνίσιων οδηγών κι έναν σπάνιο κρύσταλλο που ονομάζεται peradam και αποτελεί ό,τι και ο χρυσός στον υπόλοιπο κόσμο, δυστυχώς αυτό το ταξίδι θα διακοπεί στα μισά του πέμπτου κεφαλαίου. Μόλις στην αρχή της ανάβασης στο Όρος Ανάλογο.
Βέβαια, τουλάχιστον στην έκδοση που διάβασα δίνει πληροφορίες για το πώς θα εξελισσόταν η ιστορία και ποιο θα ήταν το τέλος της. Ο συγγραφέας σχεδίαζε να γράψει επτά συνολικά κεφάλαια και μέσα από αυτά να αποκαλύψει όσα κρύβονται στη μυστηριώδη κορυφή:
.
February 25, 2020
One wonders what René Daumal would have gotten up to if he'd lived beyond the youthful age of 36. It is impressive how much he had already achieved by that age, both in the world of letters and more broadly in the area of metaphysical inquiry. This short allegorical novel neatly synthesizes the results of his exploratory experiences testing the bounds of reality and the meaning of human existence. It remains unfinished, literally ending mid-sentence, which seems appropriate, as Roger Shattuck observes in his excellent introduction. Shattuck's introduction (best read afterwards, as Shattuck rightly suggests) is also essential reading for understanding the personal context of the novel, and Daumal's trajectory from a small-town kid experimenting with drugs in the very early days of Le Grand Jeu's collaboration to his later position as a rather imposing literary figure headquartered in Paris. Overall, an inspirational read I can see returning to in the future.
July 18, 2011
A kind of theoretical adventure story, where the protagonists work with ingenious logic backwards from the supposition that the recurrent myth of the mountain to the heavens (Olympus, Sinai, Babel) must imply an actual such mountain, and if such exists where and how could it exist so as to avoid detection until now? And then, of course, they go there. With a great deal of totally fascinating discussion of everything within Daumal's reach: philosophy, psychology, folklore, physics, all wrapped up in an exceedingly engaging tale. The novel went tragically unfinished with Daumal's death in '44, but in some ways the tantalizingly incomplete narrative fits the material. By definition, the Symbolic Mountain must have its roots in the accessible terrestrial sphere, while its peak lies far beyond earth and normal access or understanding. And so, then, does this fascinating novel extend straight from the pages into my hands into sheer possibility, into the infinite.
May 14, 2010
"I am dead because I lack desire,
I lack desire because I think I possess.
I think I possess because I do not try to give.
In trying to give, you see that you have nothing;
Seeing that you have nothing, you try to give of yourself;
Trying to give of yourself, you see that you are nothing:
Seeing that you are nothing, you desire to become;
In desiring to become, you begin to live."
I lack desire because I think I possess.
I think I possess because I do not try to give.
In trying to give, you see that you have nothing;
Seeing that you have nothing, you try to give of yourself;
Trying to give of yourself, you see that you are nothing:
Seeing that you are nothing, you desire to become;
In desiring to become, you begin to live."
October 8, 2014
Here's someone I've been meaning to read more of for years, but all I succeed in doing is rereading again and again this book that the author never finished. I don't quite agree that it's complete enough as it stands, but its incompleteness does have the advantage of stimulating one's imagination, of being like a temptation that is never satisfied but is ever alluring. At least that's why I can rereread it.
The tone of the book is of a hybrid between spiritualist/occult tract and adventure tale and reminds me somewhat of some of H. P. Lovecraft's masterpieces like At the Mountains of Madness - child's adventure tales with a mature cosmic purpose. Lovecraft was obsessed with the littleness of humanity and its ultimate destruction by extremely ancient forces and intelligences from beyond, but Daumal was much more optimistic and humanistic and was interested in the individual's ability to actually glimpse "heaven" and continuously evolve into something more. In the book a team of seekers sets out to find Mount Analogue (an actual mountain but also the literal meeting point of Heaven and Earth) using some newly (early 20th cent) discovered scientific principles such as the curvature of light. The adventurers do succeed in finding the mountain, and there is a chapter or two on the structure of the mountain society itself, but the book ends mid-sentence soon after the adventurers begin their actual ascent of the mountain. Very frustrating, yes, but it leaves one free to continue it in one's head (my miniature Shambhala edition also has Daumal's notes for part of the unfinished novel).
It's a simple book to read, and is fairly short - I read it yesterday in between fatherly duties and household chores, and was satisfying and thought-provoking enough that I felt little guilt mindlessly partying last night - so just pick it up some time and read it, and hopefully your edition will have a substantial biographical introduction like mine that will at least make you want to read more of his works and find out more about his realtively brief but fascinating and full life.
The tone of the book is of a hybrid between spiritualist/occult tract and adventure tale and reminds me somewhat of some of H. P. Lovecraft's masterpieces like At the Mountains of Madness - child's adventure tales with a mature cosmic purpose. Lovecraft was obsessed with the littleness of humanity and its ultimate destruction by extremely ancient forces and intelligences from beyond, but Daumal was much more optimistic and humanistic and was interested in the individual's ability to actually glimpse "heaven" and continuously evolve into something more. In the book a team of seekers sets out to find Mount Analogue (an actual mountain but also the literal meeting point of Heaven and Earth) using some newly (early 20th cent) discovered scientific principles such as the curvature of light. The adventurers do succeed in finding the mountain, and there is a chapter or two on the structure of the mountain society itself, but the book ends mid-sentence soon after the adventurers begin their actual ascent of the mountain. Very frustrating, yes, but it leaves one free to continue it in one's head (my miniature Shambhala edition also has Daumal's notes for part of the unfinished novel).
It's a simple book to read, and is fairly short - I read it yesterday in between fatherly duties and household chores, and was satisfying and thought-provoking enough that I felt little guilt mindlessly partying last night - so just pick it up some time and read it, and hopefully your edition will have a substantial biographical introduction like mine that will at least make you want to read more of his works and find out more about his realtively brief but fascinating and full life.
September 10, 2020
Ojsa i kuku! OJSA jer je sve našiveno po mojoj meri; avanturistički roman zasnovan na duhovitim i oštroumnim patafizičkim (be)smicalicama, gde imamo grupu sačinjenu od nakrivo nasađenih pojedinaca koje predvodi Sogol, raspop i pronalazač najapsurdnijih izuma, na spiritualnom putešestviju u traganju za najvišom planinom na svetu, sve začinjeno diskretnom ezoterijom Renea Genona i Gurđijeva i napisano lepim eliptičnim stilom. A onda dođe veliko KUKU jer roman nije završen. Ostaje samo da se očajno grebucka po Domalovim beleškama i planovima i da se na osnovu tragova, razrešenje samo domašta.
Sve pohvale za izdavača: od prevoda, izbora fonta, kvaliteta papira i ilustracija do preloma i korica. A kada se knjiga okrene naopačke tu je smešten još jedan Domalov roman - „Velika pijanka”. Nadam se završen.
Sve pohvale za izdavača: od prevoda, izbora fonta, kvaliteta papira i ilustracija do preloma i korica. A kada se knjiga okrene naopačke tu je smešten još jedan Domalov roman - „Velika pijanka”. Nadam se završen.
February 15, 2022
'And now we have reached the unknown continent, seed of superior substances implanted in the terrestrial crust, protected from curious and covetous gazes by the curvature of its space—just as a drop of mercury, by its surface tension, remains impenetrable to the finger that tries to touch its center. By our calculations—thinking of nothing else—by our desires—abandoning all other hope—by our efforts—renouncing all comfort—we had forcibly entered this new world. So it seemed to us. But later we knew that if we had been able to reach the foot of Mount Analogue, it was because the invisible doors of this invisible country had been open to us by those who guard them. The cock crowing in the milk of dawn believes that his song makes the sun rise; the child howling in a closed room thinks his cries make the door open. But the sun and the mother follow courses set by the laws of their beings. Those who see us even if we cannot see ourselves, answer our puerile calculations, our fickle desires, our small and awkward efforts with a generous welcome.'
September 9, 2012
I was delighted to find a copy of this and another long-sought-after book in a secondhand store in Dunedin last week. Slightly battered and time-stained, Daumal's slender little volume also at some point provided a home for bookworms... literally. They left pointillist patterns across the lower portion of each page; if I hold it up just right, it's like starlight.
For a "metaphysical adventure" that ends mid-chapter, mid-sentence, mid-thought, Mount Analogue failed entirely to set off my bullshit-detectors. It's been on my to-read list for the better part of a decade, long enough for that initial desire to settle into comfortable acceptance of whatever the book has to offer, and perhaps this open-mindedness is exactly what it seeks. ("And you, what do you seek?") Or what Daumal sought when he turned from Le Grand Jeu and Sanskrit translations, from dismissing the surrealists for not going far enough, from essays and absurdities and experimentation, to a work of fiction too bizarre to be true but too right to be ignored or overlooked: less sincerity than undeniable veracity.
It's about mountain-climbing, of course, the eponymous peak serving as an abstract symbol for the very concrete — and metaphorical — mountains we climb every day, even (especially?) those of us who either disdain mountain-climbing or choose to admire its adherents from sea level, sure-footed and safe. Roger Shattuck should be applauded for his exquisite translation, which I think does justice to Daumal's searching humility and adventurously poetic spirit.
(If this example of the narrator's cautious precision irritates you, probably best to give Mount Analogue a miss — for now, at least. If it made you think, a somewhat giddily, of Christian Rosenkreutz, well, stop reading my words now and track down Daumal's.)
I loved the way the mountain's space-curving mystery interacted with contemporary physics, optics, even, in a slightly problematic way, ideally viewed, like the island in "Lost," through an affectionate haze; I loved the complex inventions that required so much work to make life easier; I loved the strange geometric cosmology, the mythology of the hollow men and bitter-rose, the rhythmic, repetitive climbing songs; I loved the alien familiarity of the mountain's rules, its responsibilities.
René Daumal, you make me want to re-learn French just to read everything you wrote during your too-short life, to catch glimpse after fleeting glimpse of the workings of your mind.
For a "metaphysical adventure" that ends mid-chapter, mid-sentence, mid-thought, Mount Analogue failed entirely to set off my bullshit-detectors. It's been on my to-read list for the better part of a decade, long enough for that initial desire to settle into comfortable acceptance of whatever the book has to offer, and perhaps this open-mindedness is exactly what it seeks. ("And you, what do you seek?") Or what Daumal sought when he turned from Le Grand Jeu and Sanskrit translations, from dismissing the surrealists for not going far enough, from essays and absurdities and experimentation, to a work of fiction too bizarre to be true but too right to be ignored or overlooked: less sincerity than undeniable veracity.
If, after climbing up and down three steep gullies that end in a sheer wall (visible only at the last minute), your legs begin to tremble and your teeth to chatter, head for the nearest ledge where you can rest securely. Then rack your brain for all the oaths you have ever heard and hurl them at the mountain, spit on it, insult it as violently as you know how. Take a swallow of water, have a bite to eat, and then start climbing again, easily, slowly, as if you had a lifetime ahead of you in which to pull out of the bad spot. That night before falling asleep, when this comes back to you, you'll see how much of an act you were putting on: you weren't talking to the mountain at all, nor was it the mountain you got the better of. The mountain is nothing but rock and ice, with neither ears nor heart. But that little act may have saved your life.
It's about mountain-climbing, of course, the eponymous peak serving as an abstract symbol for the very concrete — and metaphorical — mountains we climb every day, even (especially?) those of us who either disdain mountain-climbing or choose to admire its adherents from sea level, sure-footed and safe. Roger Shattuck should be applauded for his exquisite translation, which I think does justice to Daumal's searching humility and adventurously poetic spirit.
The different branches of symbol interpretation had for a long time been my favourite field of study; I naively believed I understood something about the subject. Furthermore, I had an alpinist's passionate love of mountains. The convergence of these two contrasting areas of interest on the same subject, the mountain, had given certain passages of my article a lyric tone. (Such conjunctions, incongruous as they may appear, play a large part in the genesis of what is commonly called poetry; I venture this remark as a suggestion to critics and aestheticians who seek to illuminate the depths of that mysterious language.)
(If this example of the narrator's cautious precision irritates you, probably best to give Mount Analogue a miss — for now, at least. If it made you think, a somewhat giddily, of Christian Rosenkreutz, well, stop reading my words now and track down Daumal's.)
I loved the way the mountain's space-curving mystery interacted with contemporary physics, optics, even, in a slightly problematic way, ideally viewed, like the island in "Lost," through an affectionate haze; I loved the complex inventions that required so much work to make life easier; I loved the strange geometric cosmology, the mythology of the hollow men and bitter-rose, the rhythmic, repetitive climbing songs; I loved the alien familiarity of the mountain's rules, its responsibilities.
When you strike off on your own, leave some trace of your passing which will guide you coming back: one stone set on another, some grass flattened by a blow of your stick. But if you come to an impasse or a dangerous spot, remember that the trail you have left could lead people coming after you into trouble. So go back along your trail and obliterate any traces you have left. This applies to anyone who wishes to leave some mark of his passage in the world. Even without wanting to, you always leave a few traces. Be ready to answer to your fellow men for the trail you leave behind you.
René Daumal, you make me want to re-learn French just to read everything you wrote during your too-short life, to catch glimpse after fleeting glimpse of the workings of your mind.
I am dead because I lack desire;
I lack desire because I think I possess;
I think I possess because I do no try to give.
In trying to give, you see that you have nothing;
Seeing you have nothing, you try to give of yourself;
Trying to give of yourself, you see that you are nothing;
Seeing you are nothing, you desire to become;
In desiring to become, you begin to live.
July 25, 2024
Una novela de aventuras metafísica, ¡qué fantasía! Y qué pena que René Daumal muriera tan joven antes de terminarla. Este señor al que quisieron los surrealistas atraer a su causa (a lo que él contestó que no, muchas gracias, que él ya tenía un plan mucho mejor que el de ellos), este señor, que a sus veinte años se había dopado ya con unas cuantas sustancias, entre ellas un disolvente toxiquísimo que hoy en día solo tiene usos industriales, este señor, digo, no logro saber cuándo se está quedando con el lector y cuándo habla completamente en serio. Me inclino por lo segundo, si no por la precoz inhalación de disolvente, por su también precoz interés en el ocultismo, el misticismo y otros ismos de lo intangible.
Tanto da. Las parrafadas pseudocientíficas son muy locas y de lo que más he disfrutado de la novela. Por mi escepticismo (y también porque estoy un poco revenida espiritualmente) no estoy preparada para apreciar las sutilezas esotéricas de El monte análogo, y aun así me ha agradado mucho. ¡Cómo no me iba a gustar una novela que habla de alpinismo místico!* Aunque solo fuera por haberme hecho recordar lejanamente a Raymond Roussel, René Daumal ya contaría con mi simpatía.
________________________________________
* Me entero ahora de que la asociación montañismo + ocultismo no es tan rebuscada, y que, por ejemplo, Aleister Crowley escaló unas cuantas montañas y hasta probó suerte con el K2.
Tanto da. Las parrafadas pseudocientíficas son muy locas y de lo que más he disfrutado de la novela. Por mi escepticismo (y también porque estoy un poco revenida espiritualmente) no estoy preparada para apreciar las sutilezas esotéricas de El monte análogo, y aun así me ha agradado mucho. ¡Cómo no me iba a gustar una novela que habla de alpinismo místico!* Aunque solo fuera por haberme hecho recordar lejanamente a Raymond Roussel, René Daumal ya contaría con mi simpatía.
________________________________________
* Me entero ahora de que la asociación montañismo + ocultismo no es tan rebuscada, y que, por ejemplo, Aleister Crowley escaló unas cuantas montañas y hasta probó suerte con el K2.
December 29, 2015
This way-too-short and fatally incomplete last work of René Daumal is a weird amalgam of Swift, Verne, Melville, Pynchon and Nietzsche. I felt as if drugged while reading it, and experienced a severely dislocating sense of déjà vu as these other authors' works rose up and entered my mind.
Certainly it was nice to find an extremely rare mention in fiction (Pynchon uses it, too) of Einstein's theory of General Relativity: specifically the curvature of light by an enormous mass, the hallucinatory Mt. Analogue itself in this instance. I'll refer you to other reviewers if you want some insight into the metaphysics of this book, such as they are.
Yes, I picked the wrong book to complete the 2015 reading challenge, but at least it took only an hour to read.
Certainly it was nice to find an extremely rare mention in fiction (Pynchon uses it, too) of Einstein's theory of General Relativity: specifically the curvature of light by an enormous mass, the hallucinatory Mt. Analogue itself in this instance. I'll refer you to other reviewers if you want some insight into the metaphysics of this book, such as they are.
Yes, I picked the wrong book to complete the 2015 reading challenge, but at least it took only an hour to read.
March 8, 2013
Prende le mosse ideali dalla disciplina (si può ancora usare questa parola?) dell'alpinismo, per avventurarsi in una fantasia esoterica in senso lato. Ha il pregio di una pulizia di altri tempi (fu scritto negli anni '40) e il difetto di essere incompleto (l'autore morì di un'affezione polmonare prima di completare il testo). Il mio non è un giudizio di merito, ma di gusto. Nel rispetto dello scrittore-poeta e filosofo francese, il suo libro non ha incontrato la mia sensibilità. Per altre vie, e con maggiore acume, il nostro Buzzati ha scritto pagine assai più intense e asciutte.
May 28, 2022
My single favourite movie of all time is Alejandro Jodorowsky's "The Holy Mountain" which is a very loose adaptation of this unfinished posthumously published novel. When I finally got around to reading it, the experience was very different than that watching "The Holy Mountain" but still highly interesting in its own right.
There is none of the dystopian futuristic socio-political satire of the film, nor the trademark subverted Messianic symbolism of Jodorowsky's to be found here. As a matter of fact, the main characters and their social milieux remind me more than anything else of the supporting characters that Georges Simenon would most likely create for a novel where Inspector Maigret investigates a murder taking place in an occult secret society.
Instead, the focus is on mountaineering as a metaphor for spiritual ascension and awakening. This is the exact novel you can expect from an author who happens to be both practicing occultist and an enthusiastic mountain climber in his spare time, who paid great attention to the symbolic role that ascent of mountains (as "axes of the world") play in religions all over the world. It might be worth remembering here that British occultist Aleister Crowley was also an enthusiastic amateur alpinist, as was the Austrian mystic Guido von List who single-handedly revived Nordic paganism in the modern age, facts probably not lost on Daumal.
René Daumal's religiosity, though, is less clear-cut than neopaganism or even Thelema. It can best be described as preservation of key Buddhist insights into his own set of symbolism built seemingly from scratch that has no clear connection to any existing religious tradition. Nonetheless, the fixation on the impermanence of everything in existence is the clear foundation for all the themes here and Daumal develops it in a direction that ends up at similar conclusions as Buddhism despite the terminology and symbolism being wholly Daumal's own. I would call Daumal's worldview "secular pseudo-Buddhism" if that did not sound like an insult. I suppose this is what attracted Jodorowsky to Daumal.
The fact that Daumal did not end the novel in his lifetime, and the edition I read had no real ending, even fits into the philosophical themes of the book that way! This might be what the film's anti-ending is an attempt to top, but "Mont Analogue" and "The Holy Mountain" are so different works that I have a hard time comparing them.
There is none of the dystopian futuristic socio-political satire of the film, nor the trademark subverted Messianic symbolism of Jodorowsky's to be found here. As a matter of fact, the main characters and their social milieux remind me more than anything else of the supporting characters that Georges Simenon would most likely create for a novel where Inspector Maigret investigates a murder taking place in an occult secret society.
Instead, the focus is on mountaineering as a metaphor for spiritual ascension and awakening. This is the exact novel you can expect from an author who happens to be both practicing occultist and an enthusiastic mountain climber in his spare time, who paid great attention to the symbolic role that ascent of mountains (as "axes of the world") play in religions all over the world. It might be worth remembering here that British occultist Aleister Crowley was also an enthusiastic amateur alpinist, as was the Austrian mystic Guido von List who single-handedly revived Nordic paganism in the modern age, facts probably not lost on Daumal.
René Daumal's religiosity, though, is less clear-cut than neopaganism or even Thelema. It can best be described as preservation of key Buddhist insights into his own set of symbolism built seemingly from scratch that has no clear connection to any existing religious tradition. Nonetheless, the fixation on the impermanence of everything in existence is the clear foundation for all the themes here and Daumal develops it in a direction that ends up at similar conclusions as Buddhism despite the terminology and symbolism being wholly Daumal's own. I would call Daumal's worldview "secular pseudo-Buddhism" if that did not sound like an insult. I suppose this is what attracted Jodorowsky to Daumal.
The fact that Daumal did not end the novel in his lifetime, and the edition I read had no real ending, even fits into the philosophical themes of the book that way! This might be what the film's anti-ending is an attempt to top, but "Mont Analogue" and "The Holy Mountain" are so different works that I have a hard time comparing them.
November 8, 2014
El escritor francés René Daumal (1908-1944) dejó inacabada su segunda novela, ‘El Monte Análogo’ (Le Mont Analogue, 1944). Murió de tuberculosis dejando esta obra en mitad de una frase, literalmente. La presente edición de la Editorial Atalanta, recoge el texto de Éditions Gallimard de 1972, que incluye los apéndices y planes que tenía Daumal para terminar la novela. Se trata de una historia de aventuras, ciencia ficción, metafísica, filosofía y viaje iniciático, que, pese a no tener una conclusión, no deja de ser una magnífica novela.
La historia de ‘El Monte Análogo: Novela de aventuras alpinas no euclidianas y simbólicamente auténticas’ comienza cuando el narrador recibe una carta de Pierre Sogol, todo un personaje: excéntrico, científico, aventurero y profesor de alpinismo, entre otras actividades. En esta misiva, Sogol, después de haber leído el artículo del narrador sobre el simbolismo de las montañas, propone buscar el mítico Monte Análogo, que une el Cielo con la Tierra. El problema estriba en que dicho monte está oculto, encerrado en un espacio curvo que lo convierte en inaccesible. Pero Sogol tiene cierta idea de cómo dar con él, y para ello se embarca junto a Théodore, el narrador, y varias personas más. La aventura ha dado comienzo.
La obra se complementa con un artículo de Dumal, ‘Unos cuantos poetas franceses del siglo XXV’, que a modo de ensayo-ficción nos propone una serie de poetas inventados, que le sirven de despiadada crítica y burla de las corrientes poéticas del presente del escritor.
Extraña, amena y magnífica joya literaria.
La historia de ‘El Monte Análogo: Novela de aventuras alpinas no euclidianas y simbólicamente auténticas’ comienza cuando el narrador recibe una carta de Pierre Sogol, todo un personaje: excéntrico, científico, aventurero y profesor de alpinismo, entre otras actividades. En esta misiva, Sogol, después de haber leído el artículo del narrador sobre el simbolismo de las montañas, propone buscar el mítico Monte Análogo, que une el Cielo con la Tierra. El problema estriba en que dicho monte está oculto, encerrado en un espacio curvo que lo convierte en inaccesible. Pero Sogol tiene cierta idea de cómo dar con él, y para ello se embarca junto a Théodore, el narrador, y varias personas más. La aventura ha dado comienzo.
La obra se complementa con un artículo de Dumal, ‘Unos cuantos poetas franceses del siglo XXV’, que a modo de ensayo-ficción nos propone una serie de poetas inventados, que le sirven de despiadada crítica y burla de las corrientes poéticas del presente del escritor.
Extraña, amena y magnífica joya literaria.
September 17, 2020
What a fascinating & charming little book. And so short--just 119 pps! This is a bargain. A glimpse into French surrealist thought...dig this phrase, 'symbolically authentic'.
Think of it this way: if you enjoyed 'The Little Prince' by Saint-Exupery, you will savor this book as well. It's the same sort of whimsical yet philosophical admixture. A lot of gentle fun is poked at the over-rationalism of the modern-world and all sorts of stodgy, 'grown-up' thinking.
Those French have an under-rated sense of humor! I suppose when you lose two World Wars (& the Franco-Prussian War as well), when your nation is eternally invaded by bigger and stronger neighbors, when your own world empire was last seen on Earth circa 1845, you develop a knack for the absurd? Just speculating.
By the way, the story delivers on it's premise--there is no "bait'n'switch". A fantastic imaginary landscape is described; a group of explorers speculate on how they might reach it one day--they train for it --and they eventually succeed. This is what makes the work more than just a coy parlour-game.
"Mount Analogue" exists; it isn't just something the characters ruminate on in their parlors. They actually visit it in person. Thus, any devotee of fantasy literature would do well to investigate this little tale.
Unfortnately, it's an unfinished novel; the author was forced to halt in mid-sentence by a visitor arriving at his door--similar to what happened to Coleridge. By way of recompense, there are copious endnotes provided by the author's wife.
Think of it this way: if you enjoyed 'The Little Prince' by Saint-Exupery, you will savor this book as well. It's the same sort of whimsical yet philosophical admixture. A lot of gentle fun is poked at the over-rationalism of the modern-world and all sorts of stodgy, 'grown-up' thinking.
Those French have an under-rated sense of humor! I suppose when you lose two World Wars (& the Franco-Prussian War as well), when your nation is eternally invaded by bigger and stronger neighbors, when your own world empire was last seen on Earth circa 1845, you develop a knack for the absurd? Just speculating.
By the way, the story delivers on it's premise--there is no "bait'n'switch". A fantastic imaginary landscape is described; a group of explorers speculate on how they might reach it one day--they train for it --and they eventually succeed. This is what makes the work more than just a coy parlour-game.
"Mount Analogue" exists; it isn't just something the characters ruminate on in their parlors. They actually visit it in person. Thus, any devotee of fantasy literature would do well to investigate this little tale.
Unfortnately, it's an unfinished novel; the author was forced to halt in mid-sentence by a visitor arriving at his door--similar to what happened to Coleridge. By way of recompense, there are copious endnotes provided by the author's wife.
February 12, 2009
A handbook on how to write convincingly about fantastical scenarios. "Lost" fans will find some startling familiarities here and Calvino fans will appreciate the ingenious structure that marries invented mythology and adventure story. Daumel died before he could finish, but what exists is more than worthwhile. His notes suggest allegory was going to surface in the final chapters, so maybe the unresolved ending is preferable?
October 26, 2018
Supón que empiezas a escribir un libro que se presta a infinidad de analogías desde la autoconsciencia y a la vez no hace que prepondere la lectura entre líneas ni la retranca y, justo cuando tienes al lector absolutamente flipado con lo que estás haciendo, llegas y
August 26, 2020
Είναι σαν ένας ικανότατος συγ��ραφέας παιδικών βιβλίων, νά γράφει ένα συμβολικό, σουρεαλιστικό,Jung-ικο(λόγω αρχετυπικών αναφορών) αριστούργημα.
Ο Daumal επισημαίνει σε 130 περίπου σελίδες την αναγκαιότητα τού οράματος,της επιμονής καί τής συντροφικότητας στη ζωή κάθε ανθρώπου, χωρίς νά κάνει έναν *new age* χυλό.
Γράφει για ιδέες πού γνωρίζουμε όλοι- λογικά-με τον πιο όμορφο,ονειρικό και τεχνικά άρτιο τρόπο. Δίνει μία αναγκαία ελαφρότητα σε θέματα πού ανέκαθεν είχαν τεράστια βαρύτητα.
Δείχνει τόν "Άνθρωπο" στα καλύτερα τού.
Είναι τόσο χρήσιμο αυτό τό βιβλίο πού, αν καί ατελείωτο λόγω τού θανάτου τού συγγραφέα, κάθε λέξη μέσα του εμπνέει καί δροσίζει την ψυχη με τίς όμορφες περιγραφές του φυσικού του κόσμου και τις περιπέτειες των τολμηρών ορειβατών του στο "όρος Ανάλογο".
Ουτοπικό θα πει κάποιος. Ίσως, δεν διαφωνώ απόλυτα με τόν χαρακτηρισμό.
Αλλά ρωτάω ρητορικά (αν και απίστευτα "new age"):χωρίς αυτην την ικανότητα μας για ονειροπόληση καί αυτό τό πνεύμα αναζήτησης , αν ο καθένας μας δεν είχε ενα δικό του όρος Ανάλογο νά ανέβει,πού θά ήμασταν τώρα;
Βασικά τί θά ήμασταν;
(...Χυλός; .. μάλλον;)...
Οπότε:μετά τα "Παιχνίδι με τίς χάνδρες" καί "Σιντάρτα"τού Εσσε είναι εύκολα το καλύτερο"ουτοπικο"βιβλίο πού έχω διαβάσει.;)
4.5*
Ο Daumal επισημαίνει σε 130 περίπου σελίδες την αναγκαιότητα τού οράματος,της επιμονής καί τής συντροφικότητας στη ζωή κάθε ανθρώπου, χωρίς νά κάνει έναν *new age* χυλό.
Γράφει για ιδέες πού γνωρίζουμε όλοι- λογικά-με τον πιο όμορφο,ονειρικό και τεχνικά άρτιο τρόπο. Δίνει μία αναγκαία ελαφρότητα σε θέματα πού ανέκαθεν είχαν τεράστια βαρύτητα.
Δείχνει τόν "Άνθρωπο" στα καλύτερα τού.
Είναι τόσο χρήσιμο αυτό τό βιβλίο πού, αν καί ατελείωτο λόγω τού θανάτου τού συγγραφέα, κάθε λέξη μέσα του εμπνέει καί δροσίζει την ψυχη με τίς όμορφες περιγραφές του φυσικού του κόσμου και τις περιπέτειες των τολμηρών ορειβατών του στο "όρος Ανάλογο".
Ουτοπικό θα πει κάποιος. Ίσως, δεν διαφωνώ απόλυτα με τόν χαρακτηρισμό.
Αλλά ρωτάω ρητορικά (αν και απίστευτα "new age"):χωρίς αυτην την ικανότητα μας για ονειροπόληση καί αυτό τό πνεύμα αναζήτησης , αν ο καθένας μας δεν είχε ενα δικό του όρος Ανάλογο νά ανέβει,πού θά ήμασταν τώρα;
Βασικά τί θά ήμασταν;
(...Χυλός; .. μάλλον;)...
Οπότε:μετά τα "Παιχνίδι με τίς χάνδρες" καί "Σιντάρτα"τού Εσσε είναι εύκολα το καλύτερο"ουτοπικο"βιβλίο πού έχω διαβάσει.;)
4.5*
June 6, 2023
ilginç bir anlatıydı
kitap yazarı öldüğü için yarım kalmış, son kelime bile yarım, ellemeden eklemeden sunmuşlar çünkü farklı bakış açıları var...
kitap yazarı öldüğü için yarım kalmış, son kelime bile yarım, ellemeden eklemeden sunmuşlar çünkü farklı bakış açıları var...
February 14, 2021
I enjoyed this. Perhaps the brilliantly written introduction by Roger Shattuck is even better than the book. It's a strange feeling book, maybe a bit too obviously allegorical, but funny and strange. There are numerous overviews to read, and I don't have any details to add to those, so I'll conclude my review here.
March 7, 2011
Daumal's mountain holds none of the mystery, dread, or sense of expanded consciousness of Stapeldon's Star Maker, Melville's Moby Dick, Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym or Lovecrafts At the Mountains of Madness. It's not handled with the same level of seriousness. The book has a farcical tone - and I use that word because the sense of humor seems silly and quaint to me.
The best point of comparison is with Pym because both books are silly and pointless romps through the ocean that end in vague oblivion. This probably belongs to some 19th century genre of fiction I know nothing about. Analogue is probably positioning itself as a satire of the same genre that Pym references.
Mount Analogue is very similar in tone to an episode of Rocky and Bullwinkle - its disregard for continuity, its self-seriousness, the nobility of its characters and the absurdity of their intentions, personalities, and names ("Judith Pancake"). I really like this about it.
The book's structure plays with tone: its irreverent beginning becomes unsustainable once the flimsy ambition of the characters is shaken and distracted by the tourist economy they find at the foothills of the mountain.
The simplicity of their goal: to reach the mountain, is contrasted by the complexity of each of their respective disciplines and research interests. These interests lead each character astray into various distractions. They struggle to overcome "the nasty owl of intellectual cupidity" and resume and refocus their search for the miraculous mountain. Yet like Bas Jan Ader's performance triptych In search of the miraculous, the book is unfinished and ends with an almost dumb uncertainty that is too-easily read as tragic allegorical beauty.
Still, the novels premise of a mountain whose foothills are accessible but whose summit resides in an inaccessible sublime is fantastic. Supposedly Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain was based on this book but besides the Gurdjieff connection I see little similarity.
The best point of comparison is with Pym because both books are silly and pointless romps through the ocean that end in vague oblivion. This probably belongs to some 19th century genre of fiction I know nothing about. Analogue is probably positioning itself as a satire of the same genre that Pym references.
Mount Analogue is very similar in tone to an episode of Rocky and Bullwinkle - its disregard for continuity, its self-seriousness, the nobility of its characters and the absurdity of their intentions, personalities, and names ("Judith Pancake"). I really like this about it.
The book's structure plays with tone: its irreverent beginning becomes unsustainable once the flimsy ambition of the characters is shaken and distracted by the tourist economy they find at the foothills of the mountain.
The simplicity of their goal: to reach the mountain, is contrasted by the complexity of each of their respective disciplines and research interests. These interests lead each character astray into various distractions. They struggle to overcome "the nasty owl of intellectual cupidity" and resume and refocus their search for the miraculous mountain. Yet like Bas Jan Ader's performance triptych In search of the miraculous, the book is unfinished and ends with an almost dumb uncertainty that is too-easily read as tragic allegorical beauty.
Still, the novels premise of a mountain whose foothills are accessible but whose summit resides in an inaccessible sublime is fantastic. Supposedly Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain was based on this book but besides the Gurdjieff connection I see little similarity.
November 16, 2007
one of my favoritest of all.
i've been rereading it and will continue to, for most of my life.
an interesting movie to watch after having read this:
The Holy Mountain, by Jodorowsky. pretty much the same plot, only with the addition of torture, giant tarot cards, jesus-face-flesh-eating, decapitated animals, and bathing hippos.
i've been rereading it and will continue to, for most of my life.
an interesting movie to watch after having read this:
The Holy Mountain, by Jodorowsky. pretty much the same plot, only with the addition of torture, giant tarot cards, jesus-face-flesh-eating, decapitated animals, and bathing hippos.
July 6, 2024
i love being white guy spiritual, u can pata my physics get meta with my physical, or is it just cool guy colonialism with fun n wacky pseudoscience? these are questions even the vedas couldn’t answer in my orientalist and still ever so loving chants. i consulted a Bornean rainbow at a 47 degree angle when the curvature of the earth could reach a near sketch, an outining , of my mental butthole. and you know what the formation of crevassed edges guided me to in thought during my neo-plainest-platonist days? that i like this book anyway. and on a peculiar but rather uncertain side-note said they love that sexyy red song, “my coochie pink my bootyhole brown”, for she reaches the part of the ‘who am i ?’ that is only maintained in its disappearances, erased from the processes of consciousness over and over again only to reappear in pound town, a colloquial mount analogue. it’s the longing to shed the body, the body does drop, and we are left with an opening into a possibility of accepting what is present right in front of us yet always hidden in plainular sight-thoughts. thought sways at mountain summits on hemp ropes bought by ur parents large estate, trying to deny the downs of lying with vulgar truths. this, of course, is much in the same way sexy redd continually presents the mysteries of having a body while no longer wishing for a truth that is gained by shedding a constitution of all otherwisenesses. truth, like utter alpinous fools, we wish could be somewhere else, far off, requiring a dangerous expedition.
July 12, 2023
In high school an obscure and rare film, only available from a nearby library named “The Holy Mountain” by Alejandro Jodorowsky completely fascinated and disturbed me - the two aren’t much unalike in my life. This film, partially based on the novel “Mount Analogue” by René Daumal, was a gateway that opened doors to all kinds of other cinema, music and literature for a young me. Now, I do not believe in chance & I perceive the world as saturated with symbolic meaning. In this book there is something that’s utterly profound & should be taken seriously. This is the unfinished masterpiece of Daumal, who died mid sentence of chapter 5 shortly after writing his final words: “stabilizing the shifting earth,”. Mount analogue - mount analogy - is many ways a tale of just that: modern man’s attempt to “stabilize the shifting earth”. I know the paths I have walked, and the mountains I have climbed, perhaps have not stabilized me permanently but there have been fleeting moments, glimpses of a permanence to come, and it all started with this obscure film, inspired by this surreal book, life has a way of coming full circle and humbling you,
January 2, 2008
"The fire that kindles desire and illuminates thought never burned for more than a few seconds at a time; in between, we tried to keep it in mind."
Daumal's unfinished novel is an allegory in homage to illumination and profound thought. It is a book about seeking and responsible open-mindedness. The vehicle for Daumal's consideration of intellectual liveliness (the actual plot of the story) can seem frivolous and distracting or a bit thinly veiled; but there is humor in it and a quick pace.
The "Tale of the bitter rose and the hollow men"--a mountain legend revealed to the seekers is particularly memorable; but is counterbalanced by some poor poetry and a flat creation myth.
The books is worth reading. There is some wisdom in it. But it will frustrate most readers that it ends mid sentence, just when the real business of shedding light gets under way.
One of the book's thought provoking positions: it is a crime to create a void that you do not try to fill.
Daumal's unfinished novel is an allegory in homage to illumination and profound thought. It is a book about seeking and responsible open-mindedness. The vehicle for Daumal's consideration of intellectual liveliness (the actual plot of the story) can seem frivolous and distracting or a bit thinly veiled; but there is humor in it and a quick pace.
The "Tale of the bitter rose and the hollow men"--a mountain legend revealed to the seekers is particularly memorable; but is counterbalanced by some poor poetry and a flat creation myth.
The books is worth reading. There is some wisdom in it. But it will frustrate most readers that it ends mid sentence, just when the real business of shedding light gets under way.
One of the book's thought provoking positions: it is a crime to create a void that you do not try to fill.
January 30, 2012
This made me shriek and curl up into a ball with sheer joy.
"Julie Bonasse, between twenty-five and thirty, a Belgian actress. She was having just then a considerable success on the stage in Paris, Brussels, and Geneva. She was the confidante of a swarm of odd young people whom she guided into paths of sublime high-mindedness. She said, 'I adore Ibsen' and 'I adore chocolate eclairs,' in the same tone of mouth-watering conviction. She believed in the existence of the 'fairy of the glaciers,' and in winter she skied a great deal on slopes with cable lifts."
"Julie Bonasse, between twenty-five and thirty, a Belgian actress. She was having just then a considerable success on the stage in Paris, Brussels, and Geneva. She was the confidante of a swarm of odd young people whom she guided into paths of sublime high-mindedness. She said, 'I adore Ibsen' and 'I adore chocolate eclairs,' in the same tone of mouth-watering conviction. She believed in the existence of the 'fairy of the glaciers,' and in winter she skied a great deal on slopes with cable lifts."
December 21, 2015
Inspiring. Lyrical, and elegant (yet too short, unfortunately). Read this, if you're on your way to discovering your own Mount Analogue, if you're already on your way up, and most importantly - read it if you haven't conceived the idea at all, yet. Some hidden lights will start flickering, waking up in your brain, one by one, and from then on you're always going to be on your way up, never down, because even falling down is climbing up.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 273 reviews