From BookJive
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March 16, 1908 |
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May 21, 1944 |
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René Daumal (16 March, 1908 - 21 May, 1944) was a French writer, philosopher 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 best known 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 Sanskrit and translated some of the Tripitaka Buddhist canon into French, as well as translating the Japanese Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki into French.
Daumal's sudden and premature death of tuberculosis on May 21, 1944 in Paris was in all probability hastened by youthful experiments with a heady cocktail of drugs and psycho-active chemicals, the principal culprit amongst these no doubt being carbon tetrachloride. He died leaving his novel Mount Analogue unfinished, having worked on it up to the very day of his death.
The film Holy Mountain by Alejandro Jodorowsky is based largely on Daumal's Mount Analogue.
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Title: A Fundamental Experiment
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| Author: Rene Daumal |
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| Rene Daumal experiments with consciousness and the body’s state of mind that might lead to a higher state of being. |
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1987
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Title: Mount Analogue
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| Author: Rene Daumal |
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| 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. |
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(Le mont analogue), 2004
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Title: Mugle and the Silk
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| Author: Rene Daumal |
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| The internationally acclaimed chronicle of man's search for himself – a lively story of an expedition of artist and scholars in search of an awesome peak that links heaven and earth. |
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1997
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Title: A Night of Serious Drinking: A Novel
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| Author: Rene Daumal |
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| A group of friends spends an evening getting drunk. Then the excitement begins when the night becomes totally intoxicated - it started from apparent ecstasy that leads to madness and death… The meaning of life and humanity in this book is truly hard to believe. |
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2003
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Title: The Powers of the Word
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| Author: Rene Daumal |
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| This book 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. |
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1991
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Title: Rasa or Knowledge of the Self
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| Author: Rene Daumal |
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| Rasa, is the first gathering in English translation of essays and review articles on Hindu aesthetics and translations from the Sanskrit by the French writer Rene Daumal (1908-44). |
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1982
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Title: You've Always Been Wrong
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| Author: Rene Daumal |
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| A collection of prose and poetic works by the French writer René Daumal (1908–1944). Daumal combined his skepticism concerning Western metaphysics with a mystic's effort to maintain intense wakefulness to the present moment. Such wakefulness, according to Daumal, leads inevitably to an overwhelming vision of the Absurd. |
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1995
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