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

Literature & Fiction

Daumal, René

British & Irish

Shambhala

In this work which presents the teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky in the form of symbolic fiction, the narrator, intoxicated after an evening of reveling with friends, is taken on a journey that ranges from sublime paradises to the depths of human hells

A Night of Serious Drinking

In this work which presents the teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky in the form of symbolic fiction, the narrator, intoxicated after an evening of reveling with friends, is taken on a journey that ranges from sublime paradises to the depths of human hells

Night of Serious Drinking

Taylor & Francis Books Ltd

A Night of Serious Drinking is among Rene Daumal's most important literary works. Like Daumal's Mount Analogue it is a classic work of symbolic fiction. An unnamed narrator spends an evening getting drunk with a group of friends.; as the party becomes intoxicated and exuberant, the narrator embarks on a journey that ranges from seeming paradises to the depths of pure hell. The fantastic world depicted in A Night of Serious Drinking is actually the ordinary world turned upside down. The characters are called the Anthographers, Fabricators of useless objects, Scienters, Nibblists, Clarificators, and other absurd titles. Yet the inhabitants of these strange realms are only too familiar: scientists dissecting an animal in their laboratory, a wise man surrounded by his devotees, politicians, poets expounding their rhetoric. These characters perform hilarious antics and intellectual games, which they see as serious attempts to find meaning and freedom.

Contemporary

Gerald Duckworth Co Ltd

Le Contre-Ciel (Tusk Ivories)

Poetry

Overlook Press

You’ve Always Been Wrong is a collection of prose and poetic works by the French writer René Daumal (1908–1944). A fitful interloper among the Surrealists, Daumal rejected all forms of dogmatic thought, whether religious, philosophical, aesthetic, or political. Much like the Surrealists (and French theorists of more recent decades), Daumal saw in the strict forms and certainties of traditional metaphysics a type of thought that enslaves people even as it pretends to liberate them. These “cadavers of thought,” Daumal wrote with youthful bravado, “must be met with storms of doubt, blasphemes, and kerosene for the temples.” Daumal tied Surrealism with mystical traditions. A devoted student of Eastern religions, philosophy, and literature, he combined his skepticism about Western metaphysics with a mystic’s effort to maintain intense wakefulness to the present moment and to the irreducible particularity of all objects and experience. Such wakefulness, according to Daumal, leads inevitably to an overwhelming (and redemptive) “vision of the absurd.” Daumal’s important place in French culture of the late 1920s and 1930s has been assured by both his writings and his role as cofounder of the avant-garde journal Le Grand Jeu. Written between 1928 and 1930, You’ve Always Been Wrong reveals Daumal’s thought as it was coalescing around the rejection of Western metaphysics and the countervailing allure of Eastern mysticism. Thomas Vosteen’s nuanced translation provides English-language readers with a provocative introduction to this iconoclastic author.

You've Always Been Wrong (French Modernist Library)

History & Criticism

University Of Nebraska Press

An examination of Hindu artistic theory and culture discusses Indian poetry, music and dance and is accompanied by translations from Sanskrit literature

Rasa, or Knowledge of the Self (English and French Edition)

Politics & Social Sciences

Anthropology

New Directions

Rasa, or Knowledge of the Self: Essays on Indian Aesthetics and Selected Sanskrit Studies (English and French Edition)

Since his death in 1944, René Daumal has come to be recognized as one of the original minds of the twentieth century French letters. Poet, essayist, philosopher and translator, Sanscrit scholar and pupil of Gurdjieff, Daumal was a founder of the Grand Jeu group. He was iconoclastic and electic, able to embrace simultaneously Alfred Jarry’s Pataphysics and Hindu teachings.
Daumal's two major works in English translation, Mount Analogue and A Night of Serious Drinking, have long been classics in this country; but until now, readers have not had acess to the full range of his thought. The Powers of the Word spans a lifetime of essays and notes—many here translated for the first time—from the earliest incitements to drug use and revolt; through Daumal’s unique readings of literary works; to his more mature, but no less ardent, meditations.

The Powers of the Word: Selected Essays and Notes 1927-1943

Essays & Correspondence

City Lights Publishers

A night of serious drinking

Literary

distributed in the U.S. by Random House

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