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.
His early death from tuberculosis in 1944 left his masterpiece, Mount Analogue , unfinished; nonetheless it became his best-loved and most famous work..
Forging his own path instead of joining the group, he co-created and edited the influential literary journal Le Grand Jeu (1927-32), before turning his attentions to Eastern philosophy under the influence of Gurdjieff and Alexandre de Salzmann (model for the character Father Sogol in Mount Analogue ).
René Daumal (1908-44) was a literary prodigy in his teens, publishing poetry that attracted the attention of André Breton and the surrealists.
Translator Roger Shattuck, author of many volumes, is perhaps best known for his important book The Banquet Years , a history of the turn-of-the-century French avant-garde.
As Daumal writes, Mount Analogue is the symbolic mountain--the way that unites Heaven and Earth, a way which must exist in material and human form, otherwise our situation would be without hope.
Left unfinished after Daumal\'s death from tuberculosis in 1944--in mid-sentence, as he broke from writing to receive a visitor-- Mount Analogue offers a compelling and philosophically resonant chronicle of a group of travelers seeking the titular mountain, based on the symbolic calculations of one Father Sogol (Logos spelled backward) and his students.
This edition, a gorgeous addition to the Exact Change list, brings the original 1959 English translation by Roger Shattuck--widely considered the best--back into print.
As its numerous editions (most now rare) over the decades attest, the book has been highly influential: Alejandro Jodorowsky\'s visionary 1973 film The Holy Mountain is a loose adaptation of the book, and John Zorn based an eponymous album on it.
This pataphysical journey up a Mountain whose summit must be inaccessible, but its base accessible to human beings depicts an allegorical landscape akin to Alice in Wonderland A beloved cult classic of surrealism, pataphysics and Gurdjieffian mysticism, René Daumal\'s Mount Analogue is the allegorical tale of an expedition to a Mountain whose existence can only be deduced, not observed.
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
