Customer Reviews

Breaking Through: A Narrative of the Great Work

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This author's strength is his prose. It is dense as a fruitcake but rewarding. He used it to great effect in his classic hermetic biography of Schwaller de Lubicz, Al-Kemi.

But here his weaknesses are more on display. Vandenbroeck is not on the level of his mentor, but, like Schwaller, is obviously an upper-crust dilettante with too much time on his hands. The nature of this novel reflects this - the characters are all well-to-do Europeans flitting about making films, working in the arts, and indulging in endless philosophizing. Hard to imagine any of these characters getting their hands dirty.

The larger problem is, his characters can only do philosophizing as well as the author himself - who despite his intellectual brilliance and occasional inspiration is, at the end of the day, just another left-leaning bourgeois modernist, as opposed to Schwaller, a real aristocrat. In Al-Kemi, he likes best what is least in Schwaller, and rejects what is best, but that book is as much Schwaller as Vandenbroeck, whereas this one is almost all Vandenbroeck. The difference is telling. In Al-Kemi we get something of real esotericism, for despite his unfounded projection of higher knowledge onto the necromantic cult of Egypt (a weakness countless occultists have shared with him), Schwaller had some real insight. His disciples, not so much.

The covers to both books are by Vandenbroeck's wife, another telling little vanity, since they are both atrocious modern-art type collages. But you can't always judge a book by its cover - in this case we have one classic and one dud that look identically ugly from the outside. Al-Kemi would get my highest recommendation; this novel you can skip.

This book had to be one of the best books I have ever read. The journey that Vandenbroeck takes the reader on, is a unique one and will definitely result in a "breakthrough". Started reading his other book "Al-Kemi", and I must say I should have been reading them at the same time. A lot of things from Breaking Through become clearer in conjunction with the other book. Enjoy the journey!