Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing

René Daumal's visionary novel was barely begun at the time of his cruelly early death. Even so, this unfinished beginning, so rich in ideas & possibilities, is stronger than many completed works in the same vein. It may even be better for being unfinished, in that it provides just enough foundation for the imaginative reader to speculate & continue the narrative in his or her own mind. Reading it is a little like standing at the foot of an actual mountain, looking up at the clouds & mist that obscure most of it from view. Yet from time to time, the clouds & mist part for an instant, and we're provided with a tantalizing glimpse of the heights. To be read in conjunction with the author's other youthful work, "A Night of Serious Drinking" -- most highly (pun intended) recommended!

This is one of those 'secret books' passed from friend to friend, artist to artist. My own initiation into this work certainly came at the most needed moment, and I hope this deliriously engaging analogy speaks to you now as sweetly as it whispered to me back then. Daumal's intriguing characters are hell-bent on marking the mountain that unites heaven and earth, a geographical place that "cannot not exist." Daumal draws obvious inspiration from his metaphysical tutelage under G.I. Gurdjieff, and the book has been radically reimagined by filmmaker and Tarot master Alejandro Jodorowsky in his epic 70's masterpiece "The Holy Mountain." Have a go-go.

This is a terrific book even for those who are not into mountain climbing or the spiritual philosophy of Gurdjieff. Indeed, when I first read Mount Analogue more than 25 years ago--back in the days when I ignored introductions and back-cover blurbs--I took it for a surrealistic parody of the SciFi travel fantasies of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Part of its appeal for me lay in the way it connected my childhood interests in SF and Fantasy to my growing fascination with the high road of literary modernism. Like some armchair basecamp, Daumal's novel helped me to acclimatize myself before ascending to the loftier and more rarified air of The Magic Mountain and The Waste Land and Ulysses. But it's continuing appeal is that it is an absolutely gripping story, one that seizes you from the first page with all the tenacity of its half-crazed visionary hero Pierre Sogol, and doesn't let go for days and even weeks after you've finished reading it. Here, I think the translator, Roger Shattuck, deserves half the credit, for his English is a pleasure to the eye and the ear and to whatever it is in us that aspires to reach those sublime states where, like Daumal's narrator, we can say : "I ASSURE YOU THERE WAS FIRE AROUND US IN THE AIR!"

I first had the opportunity to read this book following a mountaineering course run by the National Outdoor Leadership School. One of our group, named Dave, had been passing the book on and everyone who read it wrote in the cover and sent it to the next person to read. NEVER a bad review. Helps you to understand how everything ties together in the world. Not too deep but just enough to make you think. Don't let the fact that the author died before completing the book throw you. Read it and you'll understand. Excellent!

This is a book that is wise . . . see if you can finish it. I use it as a text in my outdoor recreation classes. Daumal discuses the adventure of life.