"Tropic of Cancer" by Henry Miller

This book must have been revolutionary when it came out in the 1930s.  The language, the style, the unabashed uncaring for literary norms, must have been like a fresh air of rebellion to the stifled people of the 1930s who just few decades ago were under the moral oppression of the Victorian Age.

The book begins with an ode to Tanya's cunt.  And it continues in the same manner.  The word cunt is probably the most used word in the entire book.  Today it would be called just vulgar, but at the time it was unthinkable, revolutionary and brave.  Miller describes multiple women he's had sex with while living in Paris, mostly on the money of other people, or as a vagrant and a homeless person on the streets.

Most of the women he sleeps with are prostitutes (and he goes at length discussing the different types of prostitutes), but there is also the Jewish adulteress, the Russian princess with gonorrhea, the strange french woman to whom he gives 100 francs and then takes them out of her purse after having sex with her in her house above the room of her sick mother.

Chapters of lucid description of characters (mostly Miller's friends whose money he uses, at whose houses he sleeps and whose women he has sex with) and some semblance of story lines are alternated with chapters of stream-of-consciousness monologues with prophetic statements and deep insights into life and living that usually come only after a very heavy intoxication with various substances.

The book finishes in a middle of an action, just like it starts.  Nothing really happens throughout and there's no sustained plot or even any novel-length characters (except the author-narrator) but it does give an entertaining and fascinating view into the life of the American emigres in Paris between the two wars in a much different way than Hemingway.

"Mount Analogue" by Rene Daumal

It ends in mid-sentence in the fifth chapter.  Rene Daumal died days later of tubercolosis.  He was in his 36th year of his life.  Peradams.  Only Father Sogol (Logos, took me a while to figure it out without anyone pointing it out to me) found one and very low, below the mountain where no Peradams are usually found, but he had an epiphany about himself.

The book has an extensive intro section where the future planned chapters by Daumal are explained and it is a real shame that they were not written.  Or maybe the book is more effective this way?  After all Gurdjieff's "Life is real only when I AM" also stops in a middle of a sentence, and some who have seen the original manuscripts say that the published version is a much smaller selection from what was available.

"Mount Analogue" is a very readable and well written book, to be expected from a writer of Daumal's caliber, and although Gurdjieff's name is never explicitly mentioned - it is based on the ideas and understanding of Gurdjieff's system (not to be called "The Fourth Way", but simply the "Gurdjieff System") and contains the personal thoughts and development of a person working on themselves according to the system.

The explanation on how Mount Analogue would have been physically hidden from anyone for so long is definitely done by the latest science available at that period (1930s), but with today's satellites and space observation does not hold well at all, although it was probably ingenious for the time.  Also getting there, getting in and discovering no new technology (based on electricity) works on the mountain is also very interesting, especially connected to Gurdjieff's notion that electricity was discovered before and is not an inexhaustible resource. 

Of course, Father Sogol is no one but Alexandre de (von) Saltzmann, one of the foremost Gurdjieff's students, of whom not as much is known, compared to the other students like Alexandre's wife Jeanne, and the de (von) Hartmann's.  He must have been a formidable personality to have left such an impression on Daumal.

This book is a gem, even in its unfinished form, or maybe because of it.