Le Contre-Ciel ( The Counter-Heaven ) marked the start of one of the most daring and inventive careers in all of French literature. Written when its author was only twenty-two, it was honored with the prestigious Prix Jacques Doucet, awarded by the reigning triumvirate of French letters, Andr Gide, Paul Val ry, and Jean Giraudoux.

Like his idol Rimbaud, Daumal achieves in poetry a visionary expression of the urge to transcend. Le Contre-Ciel is an exploration of, among other things, death as a beginning to life rather than end, a means of shedding superficial identity and experiencing understanding and awareness concepts that Daumal later developed in his two great prose masterpieces, A Night of Serious Drinking and the posthumously published Mount Analogue.

In all of Daumal s writing, the world of concrete objects carries its full common sense of pleasure and hardship, of beauty and blight. At the same time, his philosophical turn of mind involves him in a real struggle of ideas . . . His is a startlingly clear voice in the din. Roger Shattuck

Rene Daumal (1908-1944) was one of the most original thinkers of the twentieth century; a poet, philosopher, and scholar of religion. He is the author of the novels A Night of Serious Drinking and Mount Analogue. He also published many essays on religion and philosophy, translations from Sanskrit. He died of tuberculosis in 1944, at the age of thirty-six.