Tusk ivories

"A Night of Serious Drinking is among Rene Daumal's most important literary works. Like his Mount Analogue, it is a work of symbolic fiction that can be enjoyed purely as an entertaining and imaginative story, but also for the much deeper meaning embedded in its deceptively simple plot: An unnamed narrator spends an evening getting drunk with a group of friends. As the party becomes intoxicated and more and more exuberant, the narrator embarks on a journey ranging from seeming paradises to the depths of pure hell. The fantastic world depicted in A Night of Serious Drinking is actually the ordinary world tumed upside down. The characters are called the Anthographers, Fabricators of Useless Objects, Scienters, Nibblists, Ciarificators, and other absurd titles. Yet the inhabitants of these strange realms are only too familiar; scientists dissecting an animal in their laboratory a wise man surrounded by his devotees, politicians and poets expounding their rhetoric. These characters perform hllarious antics and intellectual games, which they see as serious attempts to find meaning and freedom." "Daumal's keen perceptions about the human condition infuse A Night of Serious Drinking with a critique of culture and consciousness that is both disquieting and enlivening Book jacket."--BOOK JACKET.

Ultramarine is the story of Dana Hilliot's first voyage, as mess-boy on the freighter Oedipus Tyrannus bound for Bombay and Singapore: of his struggle to win the approval of his shipmates, trying to match their example in the bars and bordellos of the Chinese ports while at the same time remaining faithful to his first love, Janet, back home in England. Alternating between Dana's own narrative and the ribald humor and colorful language of the seamen's conversation, Ultramarine depicts a boy's initiation into the company of men.