What others have said about the Literary Art of Adi Da Samraj

The Mummery Book is brilliant in all its aspects. It would be hard to express my happiness at the way it breaks and exposes the heart of the world. Living and working as a writer for many decades, I have not encountered a book like this, that mysteriously and unselfconsciously conveys so much of the Unspeakable Reality.

The Mummery Book is a most extraordinary novel indeed. While contemporary postmodern fictions claims to have assimilated the most daring philosophical experiments of the twentieth century, too many contemporary authors have forgotten the spiritual substance of these experiments, so that their literary works remain mere exercise in style. Without the slightest bit of scholarly pedantry, The Mummery Book is devoted to the real problem that engages contemporary philosophy and political theory: finitude, mortality, the critique of egoic subjectivity, and above all the affirmation of life in the face of its apparently tragic character.

Framed as an allegory, The Mummery Book employs innovative syntax and narrative strategies to challenge and disable the linear rationality that we are trained to bring to texts, and that the allegory form itself seems to invite, leading to a reading experience that is nothing short of explosive (the ‘real’ world of power and need dissolves into a mere mummer’s play) and revelatory (a new, ecstatic relationship to life is glimpsed).

Those familiar with contemporary philosophy will recognize methodological and thematic parallels with the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida, as well as writers of fiction who have been inspired by this work. But unlike most postmodern fiction, style here is in the service of substance, while remaining playful. This is a book that one will turn to again and again for the insight and pleasure it offers.

.If Dylan Thomas and Buddha shared a soul, The Mummery Book is what I would expect from such a joining. The Mummery Book is a vortex which, if you will permit it, will enliven, awaken, and rejuvenate the soul not only of this mortal life, but the soul of every existence possible. The Mummery Book is lucid, wild, an unraveling portrait of ego-life and a radiant vision of transcendence, which pass each other on the heart’s walk across the pages of this luminous book.

The Mummery Book is a novel in the mode of a vast parable, in which mystical and esoteric states of awareness are fleshed in poetic imagery. It is an experimental work—what Adi Da Samraj calls a “prose opera”—that shatters the conventional limits of language and raises literary portrayal to radical levels of consciousness. It is a revelation of the reader’s actual condition of being. It is a communication of totality—it contains, understands, and transcends all meanings the mind can manufacture, in a multileveled process of simultaneous representation. It is a wholly original literary masterwork.