The Process
by Brion Gysin
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Book Summary Information
Author: Brion GysinEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2005-11-29
ISBN: 1585677116
Number of pages: 324
Publisher: Overlook TP
Book Reviews of The Process
Book Review: "You may not pass this way again in a lifetime..."
Summary: 5 Stars
Brion Gysin's book of drugs, magic and the Desert is part fantasy, part memoir, and part guidebook. The reader may find it mystifying and confusing at first read, and it's certainly not a straightfoward story in the conventional sense. There are many twists in this fictional tale of Ulys O. Hanson of Ithaca College, not the least of which is the thinly-veiled life story of Gysin himself as he discovers and embraces the music and culture of the Sahara.
"The Process" is a book about journeys, and of becoming, with the Desert serving as Gysin's grand metaphor. The novel itself moves from west to east -- it begins with a quote from Shakespeare and ends with an epilogue from Kashf Ul-Haqa'iq, a 13th-century Persian mystic. The story also gains centifugal force as it spins around the rituals and music of Morocco's master musicians of Jajouka. Late in the novel Gysin/Hanson speaks it plainly: "You see what I'm getting at, don't you? We are, all of us here, in an extreme situation -- between birth and death, you agree?" Seldom does a novel put the life force itself at center-stage.
The book is full of secrets (in one aspect its Gysin's own diary of actual people and events) but it is also a manual filled with answers. The novel is indeed trippy, but in the grandest sense; and like life itself "The Process" is full of marvellous confusion, contradiction and not a little pain. The promise of Othello's "round unvarnished tale," at the novel's beginning, gives way to Ul-Haqa'iq's "unveiling of realities." At journey's end, of course, there is always the question all of us will face: "Why were you in such a hurry to get here, when the Desert gets us all in the end?" Highly recommended.
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