Mount Analogue

Rating:
Summary: A Mountaineering Must
Review: 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!

Rating:
Summary: One of the top three books that I have read.
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A terrific read and a literary classic
Review: 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 thirty years ago--back in the days when I ignored introductions and back-cover blurbs--I took it for a surrealistic parody of the Science Fiction travel fantasies of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Part of its appeal for me lay in the way it connected my suburban childhood interests in SF and Fantasy to my growing fascination with the high road of literary modernism. Like some armchair basecamp, Daumal's novel enabled me to acclimatize myself before ascending to the loftier and more rarified air of modernist classics like The Magic Mountain and Ulysses and The Waste Land. But the enduring appeal of Mount Analogue for me lies in the fact that it is an absolutely gripping story, one that seizes you from the first page with all the force of its half-crazed visionary hero, Pierre Sogol, and does not let go for days and even weeks after you have put it down. Here, I think the translator, Roger Shattuck, deserves some of the credit, for his English is a pleasure to both the eye and the ear and to whatever it is in us that aspires to reach those sublime states where, like Daumal, we can say : "I ASSURE YOU THERE WAS FIRE AROUND US IN THE AIR!"

Rating:
Summary: A symbollically non-Euclidian adventure in mountainclimbing.
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: One of the top three books that I have read.
Review: This small, unfinished work is packed with wonderful ideas and a spirituality that appeals to both the head and the heart. Daumal's characters have the conviction that the mythical mountain that reaches from earth to heaven must actually exist, so they do the only reasonable thing -- they mount an expedition. A beautiful book.