ABOUT THE BOOK
An adolescent boy sails to the remote monasteries and hermitages of Mount Athos. His spiritual and erotic wanderings in the picturesque surroundings of the Holy Mountain take both author and reader on a journey of self-discovery.
Augiéras decribed Athos as a place where you “find everything within yourself”, and the experiences in this book as a “sojourn in the Land of the Spirits according to the strictest Buddhist or Pythagorean Orthodoxy”.
Described variously as an anti-Christian nomad, a barbarian in the West and a madman, Augiéras is one of France’s great underground writers. Like its author, Journey to Mount Athos is full of subtle, ancient wisdom.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
François Augiéras was born in 1925 in Rochester, New York. His father was French; a pianist, his mother was a Polish émigrée. After his father died he returned to Paris, but spent his adolescence in Périgord, which was to be his refuge during a life of restless wandering. In 1945 he went to Algiers for a year, living with his reclusive uncle, a retired colonel, and in a Trappist monastery. This, and time spent with the monks of Athos, were profound influences both on his writing and is painting, often likened to a ‘modern icons’. André Gide, who knew him, described his writing as “a bizarre delight”. Augiéras died in a hospice at Domme in 1971 aged forty-six.
Translated from the French by SUE DYSON & CHRISTOPHER MONCRIEFF
ISBN 978 1 901285 39 0
