There is something excitingly mysterious about this novel, which is something of a cult book for a tight-knit community around the world, especially in France and the USA. He remained unfinished. Its author died while working on it. The story just breaks off after a good hundred pages, in the middle of a sentence, on a comma.
“Der Berg Analog” by René Daumal was published in 1952, eight years after his death. It was last reissued in German in 2017, by a small publishing house whose range looks as if the readership aura commutes and believes in fairies. In France, on the other hand, the highly important publishing house Gallimard just rolled out the red carpet for the same work. The novel, or the novel fragment, is only the middle part of the magnificent volume, the cover of which is adorned with a sacred Hilma af Klint painting. There are also illustrations, photos, accompanying texts, facsimiles, interviews, a foreword and an afterword by Patti Smith.
“Der Berg Analog” is an adventure novel and fable at the same time. It is about the expedition of a motley group from Paris who hope to find the meaning of life on a mountain. The first-person narrator, Theodor, who works for a paleontology journal, has an article about his idea fixe publishes that somewhere there is an undiscovered mountain, higher than Mount Everest, which is the link between the earthly and divine world. Surprisingly, he gets readers’ mail from a certain Dr. Sogol, who turns out to be an eccentric polymath, who decked out his apartment on the top floor of an apartment building in Paris’ fifth arrondissement like a mountain path, complete with falling rocks. Here he teaches higher daughters and sons in alpinism. He too is convinced of the existence of this mountain. Together with other acquaintances they go on a search. To anticipate the end, which isn’t the end: you actually find the mountain. When the text breaks off, however, they are still at its foot.
The book has something of “Tim and Struppi”, Hermann Hesse and “Little Prince”
An apartment with a mountain trail, an eccentric group on a world tour, a guru-like leader – while reading, you already have the Wes Anderson film adaptation in mind, which, however, does not exist. Only Alejandro Jodorowsky has attempted a cinema adaptation so far: his film “The Holy Mountain” (1973) is at least based on motifs from the novel. To adore the book, it doesn’t hurt to have discovered it when you were young. It’s imaginative and clever, and has something of the adventures of Tintin in it’s best sense. German readers might at times be reminded of Michael Ende, spiced up with a touch of Hermann Hesse, although comparisons do an injustice to Daumal’s original work. Adults also find comfort and advice in it. And passages that are suitable for posting in social networks, such as this: “You can’t always stay on the summits. You have to go back down. Then why at all? Therefore: The above knows the below, the below doesn’t know the above. ” Yes, a pinch of “Little Prince” is also included.
And a pinch of Nostradamus: The novel ends just as the first-person narrator begins to realize what catastrophic consequences it has when humans arbitrarily intervene in the balance of nature.
And about as exciting as the novel was the life of its author. René Daumal only lived 36 years, but intensely. Born in 1908 in a village in north-eastern France, he undertook violent drug experiments with friends as a high school student under the strong influence of Rimbaud. Among other things, he inhales highly toxic carbon tetrachloride, where he becomes convinced that he can encounter another world in near-death experiences. At the age of 17, he taught himself Sanskrit and retranslated sacred Indian scriptures into French. He discovers mountaineering and becomes an enthusiastic alpinist. At the age of 20, he co-founded the literary magazine in Paris, which was closely related to surrealism Le Grand Jeu, which is discontinued after three and a half issues because the editors are at odds. It was in this environment that he also met his future wife, Vera Milanova, a Russian Jew, whom he might marry in 1940 in order to save her from deportation. He writes poems, articles and translates, in addition to Sanskrit, now also from English.
Yoga, Zen Buddhism, sacred dances – and then his first novel: “The Big Binge”
In 1930, in a café in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, he met the painter Alexandre de Salzmann, a student of the Greek-Armenian esotericist Georges I. Gurdjieff, who was gathering a community in a suburb. His spiritual teaching is called “The Fourth Way” and is not unlike today’s mindfulness movement. Goal: to awaken and exploit the potential that lies dormant in every human being. Frank Lloyd Wright was one of the many well-known artists and personalities who moved in Gurdjieff’s circle. Daumal, too, now becomes a disciple of Gurdjieff, whose philosophy will echo in the “Berg Analog”.
He is interested in yoga, zen buddhism, sacred dances. He is temporarily the spokesman for the Indian dancer Uday Shankar (brother of the famous sitar player Ravi Shankar). A first novel is created: “The Great Besic” (1938). It’s about abyss and excess. Despite failing health – probably a late consequence of the drug experiments – Daumal is drawn to the peaks of the Pyrenees and Alps. Even after he was diagnosed with a far advanced tuberculosis, incurable, he continued to search for the dizzying heights of the mountains, perhaps even more so now.
During the Second World War, he and Vera left Paris, constantly changing domiciles. Back in the capital, Daumal resumes work on a novel he began years before: Der Berg Analog. His health is declining rapidly, at some point he can no longer get out of bed, but he continues to write. A week before his death, a friend takes the last photo of him: Daumal is lying in bed fully clothed, white shirt collar under his sweater, his beard is dark, he looks sadly into the camera. Patti Smith was deeply moved by this photograph, taken in May 1944: “I saw him in a fever, his head propped on a pillow,” she writes in the epilogue. “He longed for nothing more. He felt a force as palpable as the wind. He saw the young tree bend, the blood in his hand singing, the stillness of love. And as the earth receded, felt he a throbbing, a touch on his cheek. The elastic memory of a life to come.”
Patti Smith has fallen under the spell of his work and person – he’s like a brother
Here you can feel it, the magic that emanates from the work and the person of René Daumal to this day. In any case, Patti Smith, who is easily attracted to the works of dead Frenchmen anyway, has fallen for René Daumal. He was like a brother to her, she confessed, not a day went by that she didn’t think of him. She named her 2020 album (along with Soundwalk Collective) after the invented currency used on Mount Analog: “Peradam”.
But Daumal’s novel lives on not only in Patti Smith’s work. Since last spring, the sky over Paris has been illuminated every night with it as a light installation: the artist Philippe Parreno placed an LED lighthouse cap on the column next to François Pinault’s newly opened “Bourse de Commerce” museum, in which a color is stored for each word in the novel is. The work is called “Mont Analogue”. In Los Angeles there is a well-known record shop called “Mount Analog” (focus on vinyl), in Seattle there is the independent bookshop “Mount Analogue”, in Stockholm a creative agency of the same name. Irish video artists refer to the work just as much as Armenian art exhibitions, you can’t stop finding it with a Google search. There’s even a real, real, real mountain analog now: a 10,000-foot (3,170-meter) peak in West Antarctica was named after the novel in the 1970s.
They all find something in the story written by a man who had dedicated his life to finding meaning, knowing his death was near. In this fairy tale, in which Daumal cheerfully and earnestly describes an outer journey that is at the same time an inner one, on which people can move mountains through faith, on which step by step one arrives at higher wisdom.
Perhaps it is precisely because of its missing ending that the novel is still able to exert such an appeal. The final comma can be taken as an invitation to find your own answers, your very own mountain peak. At least there is a faint hint as to what kind of ending Daumal had in mind: “I have just written the first two of nine or ten chapters of a story that will be the continuation of the ‘Big Binge’, its counterpart, so to speak,” Daumal wrote in 1939 a letter to a friend: “a glimpse into a world in which there is truth, goodness and beauty. I never liked stories that ended unhappily.” Happy ending, no matter how you find it.
“Les Monts Analogues de René Daumal”, Gallimard publishers (in French), 232 pages, 39 euros.