Le Contre-ciel

LE CONTRE-CIEL is a powerful and transcendent collection of poetry. Rene Daumal presents, in the form of easily digestible verse, a stirring and provocative meditation on life, death, and the afterlife. 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 honoured with the prestigious Prix Jacques Doucet, awarded by the reigning triumvirate of French letters, Andre Gide, Paul Valery, and Jean Giraudoux. 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.