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Mountainhead
New Juche ist das Pseudonym eines heute in Südostasien lebenden Schotten. Seine literarischen und fotografischen Werke befassen sich mit urbanen Randzonen, mit Orten und Bedingungen von Prostitution und den Seltsamkeiten und Widersprüchen sexueller Imagination. Der Erzähler seiner Geschichten ist ein verkleideter Mystiker, ständig auf der Suche nach Epiphanien, nach Augenblicken heruntergekommenster Awkwardness und Poesie. In seiner Freundschaft mit sich langsam selbst zugrunderichtenden Alkoholikern in Kambodscha erlebt er Visionen von Vollkommenheit, in einem Bergdorf in Thailand erforscht er Zauber und Metaphysik verschiedener Toilettenräume, er verwickelt sich in absurdeste Missverständnisse und Liebesabenteuer mit Prostituierten, Verrückten und Wildfremden. Er versenkt sich in alte Fotografien und verfallende Gebäude.
Als Arthur Rimbaud, der große Heilige unserer literarischen Moderne, mit achtzehn Jahren den Dichterberuf aufgab, um Abenteurer und Waffenhändler in Afrika zu werden, könnte er ganz ähnliche Gedanken gehabt haben wie es die Protagonisten von New Juche heute haben, in Phnom Penh oder Bangkok, ungefiltert, grausam, übererotisiert, immer voll alchemistischer Sehnsucht nach der Kombination der richtigen Zauberzutaten innerhalb der Wirklichkeit, und in ständiger Ahnung des Göttlichen mitten im Unrat und Elend. (Text: Clemens J. Setz)
»Die Orte, die mir am besten gefielen, wurden durch Fotos rätselhaft. Die Bilder bildeten eine glatte, wellige Haut über ihren Motiven, an der ich mich gern rieb.«
Als Arthur Rimbaud, der große Heilige unserer literarischen Moderne, mit achtzehn Jahren den Dichterberuf aufgab, um Abenteurer und Waffenhändler in Afrika zu werden, könnte er ganz ähnliche Gedanken gehabt haben wie es die Protagonisten von New Juche heute haben, in Phnom Penh oder Bangkok, ungefiltert, grausam, übererotisiert, immer voll alchemistischer Sehnsucht nach der Kombination der richtigen Zauberzutaten innerhalb der Wirklichkeit, und in ständiger Ahnung des Göttlichen mitten im Unrat und Elend. (Text: Clemens J. Setz)
»Die Orte, die mir am besten gefielen, wurden durch Fotos rätselhaft. Die Bilder bildeten eine glatte, wellige Haut über ihren Motiven, an der ich mich gern rieb.«
200 pages, Paperback
First published March 18, 2017
7 people are currently reading
734 people want to read
About the author
New Juche
12 books80 followersNew Juche is the nom de guerre of a writer and photographer who lives and works in Southeast Asia. He is also the author of Wasteland, The Mollusc and Gymnasium.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 36 reviews
April 26, 2017
Dense, disturbing, and fascinating. I risk being too cutesy by suggesting that, if Blake Butler wrote Scorch Atlas after moving to Thailand and subsisting on a steady diet of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Tsai Ming-Liang and Anucha Boonyawatana, it might have turned out a little like Mountainhead.
There's some dark, sordid, fetishistic material here, that usually churns and breaks apart before I have time to raise the expected objections. A very uncomfortable read.
It ends like this:
There's some dark, sordid, fetishistic material here, that usually churns and breaks apart before I have time to raise the expected objections. A very uncomfortable read.
It ends like this:
I feel the meat-flower of her foreign breath on my eye. In her needy uneasy embrace is the new charity of the trees and the earth of the orchard; the lodge is mine again, after all and forever. But the time has come to move from here, which has become like a collection of photographs to me. My early career in anthropology has been in error. I would like the chance to truly embrace poverty, solitude and the pain of my conditions without medicinal armour, I want to defect permanently to the deep blue East, to breathe wind and petrol, to eat wild flowers.
March 1, 2020
Wow. A more difficult read than I had anticipated after reading NJ's "Stupid Baby" a couple months back. That chapbook was a good introduction to NJ's persona and his passions (a penchant for older prostitutes in SE Asia), but you learn a lot more about his specific kinks in this novel/memoir. Some are very disgusting and his sexual encounters are described in extremely vivid detail.
Actually, everything in "Mountainhead" is described in vivid detail. The people he encounters, his private thoughts, and especially the nature of the setting (primarily northern Thailand.) He manages to find beauty in nearly everything, even the graffiti found in bathroom stalls that he remembers from his youth.
Really exceptional descriptive writing, though I sometimes found myself admiring the writing more than genuinely enjoying the reading experience. Overall though, it was worth making it through the rougher parts of the book and I can imagine returning to this later and seeing how it hits me on a second read now that I'm more prepared.
I would recommend reading "Stupid Baby" before taking the deep dive into this one.
Actually, everything in "Mountainhead" is described in vivid detail. The people he encounters, his private thoughts, and especially the nature of the setting (primarily northern Thailand.) He manages to find beauty in nearly everything, even the graffiti found in bathroom stalls that he remembers from his youth.
Really exceptional descriptive writing, though I sometimes found myself admiring the writing more than genuinely enjoying the reading experience. Overall though, it was worth making it through the rougher parts of the book and I can imagine returning to this later and seeing how it hits me on a second read now that I'm more prepared.
I would recommend reading "Stupid Baby" before taking the deep dive into this one.
June 15, 2018
Full Review
Mountainhead is a sometimes beautiful, sometimes disturbing, but always excellently crafted book of prose. I could compare this book to Henry Miller, Paul Bowles, George Bataille, or Peter Sotos, but New Juche's voice is unique and powerful. While the subject matter will no doubt be incredibly off-putting to some, I believe Mountainhead is an amazing literary accomplishment. Very highly recommended.
Mountainhead is a sometimes beautiful, sometimes disturbing, but always excellently crafted book of prose. I could compare this book to Henry Miller, Paul Bowles, George Bataille, or Peter Sotos, but New Juche's voice is unique and powerful. While the subject matter will no doubt be incredibly off-putting to some, I believe Mountainhead is an amazing literary accomplishment. Very highly recommended.
December 28, 2023
Op de valreep een van de meest aangrijpende, betekenisvolle, desastreuze boeken in jaren gelezen. Ik weet niet welk antidotum ik nu moet innemen om mij te ontdoen van dit ruïneuze gif.
"Mijn misdaden, waarover ik nog steeds alleen maar kan spreken door die aan te duiden, hebben samengewerkt met de mysteries van mijn omgeving om me een voertuig van nederigheid te tonen. Maar de regen geselt ook mijn zachte, afzichtelijke billen om de laatste sporen van de ernst, de persoonlijke glorie en de eer van wreedheid eruit te halen, die in hun altijdgroene kankers door deze woorden doordrenkt zijn met de elegantie en tevredenheid waarmee ik ze prijs en mezelf nog steeds definieer. Ik beef nu, omdat mijn hart koud is. Mijn handen en vingers tasten naar stenen en wortels en glijden door materie die ik niet kan identificeren of begrijpen. Ik denk aan modder, stront, rijstwater, zwaar gecorrodeerde zandsteen in netten van rubberachtige plantenwortels, begraven harten en longen, het magere vlees van Aziatische ledematen, sponzig penisvlees gesneden en verpakt als sigaren, de afschuwelijke klonten kliermateriaal die zich verbergen in de borsten van vrouwen. Ik beweeg mijn armen door het geweld heen, grijp de zware takken en hun huid geeft mee als vlees. Ik lik de ruwe schachten en omhul bolvormige uitsteeksels en chaos van groei. Het levende hout hapt naar adem als ik word geslagen en gegeseld, en mijn armen, zo nat en gespierd, volgen mijn mond dansend in obscene samenspraak met harde, zure vingers." (vert. : Michel Jonker, uitgever: Prometheus, 2023)
"Mijn misdaden, waarover ik nog steeds alleen maar kan spreken door die aan te duiden, hebben samengewerkt met de mysteries van mijn omgeving om me een voertuig van nederigheid te tonen. Maar de regen geselt ook mijn zachte, afzichtelijke billen om de laatste sporen van de ernst, de persoonlijke glorie en de eer van wreedheid eruit te halen, die in hun altijdgroene kankers door deze woorden doordrenkt zijn met de elegantie en tevredenheid waarmee ik ze prijs en mezelf nog steeds definieer. Ik beef nu, omdat mijn hart koud is. Mijn handen en vingers tasten naar stenen en wortels en glijden door materie die ik niet kan identificeren of begrijpen. Ik denk aan modder, stront, rijstwater, zwaar gecorrodeerde zandsteen in netten van rubberachtige plantenwortels, begraven harten en longen, het magere vlees van Aziatische ledematen, sponzig penisvlees gesneden en verpakt als sigaren, de afschuwelijke klonten kliermateriaal die zich verbergen in de borsten van vrouwen. Ik beweeg mijn armen door het geweld heen, grijp de zware takken en hun huid geeft mee als vlees. Ik lik de ruwe schachten en omhul bolvormige uitsteeksels en chaos van groei. Het levende hout hapt naar adem als ik word geslagen en gegeseld, en mijn armen, zo nat en gespierd, volgen mijn mond dansend in obscene samenspraak met harde, zure vingers." (vert. : Michel Jonker, uitgever: Prometheus, 2023)
September 21, 2019
Here I sit in my Compacty Blacky's (black version of tighty whiteys, you're welcome), last night's sweat breeding a gummy, urine-colored layer of film over my body. I must have rolled around a lot in fevered dream convulsions, and I also happened to finish New Juche's slim book before bed. It feels apt that my body appears to have come to blows with venereal phantoms throughout the night, since Mountainhead is a hypersexual masterpiece of venomous propulsion.
It is part autofiction, travelogue, memoir, incantation, and exorcism. A journal of a man I grew to fear and respect, full of prose so vivid I could feel the soil of Southeast Asia clogging my veins. There are pictures, as well, to help orient you. Juche explores this landscape not as an expat or an observer, he inserts himself primordially, assimilating with orifices of the living and the dead. Trees, animals, mushrooms, and prostitutes.
New Juche is exploring this humid continent as a deviant despot, but one with a Freudian compassion and beautiful lack of control. A lack of control only for the sensual bounds that most humans don't even attempt to explore. In a normal person-to-person transactional sense, Juche is a blessed, if frenzied compatriot.
"Pod and I not only tolerated, but derived a curious pleasure from washing Martin's exhausted body and laying it down carefully on his cot...We would fold his leathery wings behind him in silence...Martin's skin would become damp, and then cursed with a froth of creamy soap...which fell away like scales...I was especially gentle and respectful with the papery skin that covered his thighs, and the wooden, vegetable quality of his kneecaps...When Martin is dead, I thought, we'll roll dice made from his kneecaps."
In ascending the mountain with Juche, I had the youthful urge many times to drop the job, the fiancee, the cats, walk the earth like Jules and assimilate with foreign and dangerous fauna. This is a dangerous book if you are of a certain constitution that flirts with arrested development and nihilism. Juche slowly expatriates himself from humanity and I am not certain what he found on the mountain, even though he narrates his journey exquisitely, because this is literature so personal and fevered that I came to tears. All while Juche came on the world, jism as a sort of language, as if his penis was constantly mourning.
"I nuzzle and rub my face in the mud as a passionate apology and feel blood pump sparingly but steadily into my penis, not because of the soil or the rain, or the sensation of it on my face and eyes or in my mouth, but out of the satisfaction I derive from my virtuoso gesture of sensitive capitulation. And then there is that visceral spasm that my language has yet to capture, that draws from the liberation attained through abject behavior, and the Great Warm Ecstasy that one feels absolutely beside one in these moments (do you know these moments?), like a giant bubble that could be leapt into, but only ever recedes like the object of desire in a dream. And you'll agree that my harmony is the touchstone, my attribute, and that the danger and hunger I bravely endure are real and necessary, and have qualified my ascension."
This might even be a harmful book for young, explorative minds. If I had read this in my teens, I might've continued on the path of pain that I eventually veered from before it was too late. But then again, what options do Generation Z, or whatever they are called, have? The sacred is evaporating, burning up, empty overgrown tracts to fornicate upon (mentally or otherwise) are peopled and walled in. We ain't in Walden anymore.
New Juche is buttressed in extinction, and I imagine he will die there before the Main Event, crying and smiling and masturbating as it all burns away in front of his eyes. He seems to be alive and well right now, and I need more.
Check my blog https://bluescapes.blogspot.com/2019/...
It is part autofiction, travelogue, memoir, incantation, and exorcism. A journal of a man I grew to fear and respect, full of prose so vivid I could feel the soil of Southeast Asia clogging my veins. There are pictures, as well, to help orient you. Juche explores this landscape not as an expat or an observer, he inserts himself primordially, assimilating with orifices of the living and the dead. Trees, animals, mushrooms, and prostitutes.
New Juche is exploring this humid continent as a deviant despot, but one with a Freudian compassion and beautiful lack of control. A lack of control only for the sensual bounds that most humans don't even attempt to explore. In a normal person-to-person transactional sense, Juche is a blessed, if frenzied compatriot.
"Pod and I not only tolerated, but derived a curious pleasure from washing Martin's exhausted body and laying it down carefully on his cot...We would fold his leathery wings behind him in silence...Martin's skin would become damp, and then cursed with a froth of creamy soap...which fell away like scales...I was especially gentle and respectful with the papery skin that covered his thighs, and the wooden, vegetable quality of his kneecaps...When Martin is dead, I thought, we'll roll dice made from his kneecaps."
In ascending the mountain with Juche, I had the youthful urge many times to drop the job, the fiancee, the cats, walk the earth like Jules and assimilate with foreign and dangerous fauna. This is a dangerous book if you are of a certain constitution that flirts with arrested development and nihilism. Juche slowly expatriates himself from humanity and I am not certain what he found on the mountain, even though he narrates his journey exquisitely, because this is literature so personal and fevered that I came to tears. All while Juche came on the world, jism as a sort of language, as if his penis was constantly mourning.
"I nuzzle and rub my face in the mud as a passionate apology and feel blood pump sparingly but steadily into my penis, not because of the soil or the rain, or the sensation of it on my face and eyes or in my mouth, but out of the satisfaction I derive from my virtuoso gesture of sensitive capitulation. And then there is that visceral spasm that my language has yet to capture, that draws from the liberation attained through abject behavior, and the Great Warm Ecstasy that one feels absolutely beside one in these moments (do you know these moments?), like a giant bubble that could be leapt into, but only ever recedes like the object of desire in a dream. And you'll agree that my harmony is the touchstone, my attribute, and that the danger and hunger I bravely endure are real and necessary, and have qualified my ascension."
This might even be a harmful book for young, explorative minds. If I had read this in my teens, I might've continued on the path of pain that I eventually veered from before it was too late. But then again, what options do Generation Z, or whatever they are called, have? The sacred is evaporating, burning up, empty overgrown tracts to fornicate upon (mentally or otherwise) are peopled and walled in. We ain't in Walden anymore.
New Juche is buttressed in extinction, and I imagine he will die there before the Main Event, crying and smiling and masturbating as it all burns away in front of his eyes. He seems to be alive and well right now, and I need more.
Check my blog https://bluescapes.blogspot.com/2019/...
March 27, 2023
Part confessional, part travelogue, part prose poem - Mountainhead is hard to pin down in terms of genre and style.
The authorial voice is that of the author -New Juche - a Scottish writer, photographer, and self-proclaimed amateur ethnographer, who from a mountain in northern Thailand, recounts his time there, along with past episodes from the seedy underworlds of Phnom Penh and Bangkok.
I was grabbed right away by the bare-bones confessional style. The author is not afraid to lay bare the most intimate details about his psyche, especially his [by most cultural standards] depraved sexual urges.
Be warned, this is transgressive stuff. Many pages of errant sexual behavior will test the resolve of readers. Excessive masturbation, fetishization of amputees, drug-fueled hooker-frenzies, and even a short-lived notion of fancy involving child prostitutes.
Not for the faint of heart.
However, New Juche manages to juxtapose the depravity with bouts of beauty, most often through the mastery of his prose, whose rhythm and tonality are incredibly poised, and capable of describing the vulgarity in a way that makes it not just shocking, but possibly beautiful in its own twisted way.
There are contrasting elements as well; episodes in natural environments of stark beauty and resonance, and dream-like scenes that possess a kind of hallucinogenic power, if indeed the meaning of these tableaux evaded me at times.
It could be said that the book has a kind of "Lolita effect"; the reader is brought to a place where the transgressive thoughts and actions of the speaker seem less and less morally troublesome, the more you are spellbound by the way with words, and the incredible attention to detail in his vision. Only the difference is, that Humbert Humbert is a fictional character, and New Juche is a real person telling us openly about the inner workings of his mind, from which many would be ready to ostracize him from society completely.
I came away from the book thinking New Juche is a bit of a sick fuck, but he made me consider the sick-fuckyness of him with a new sense of sympathy, and that is a great thing for literature to do.
Also, who knows how much he inflated parts of his personality to give the text more verve and raw transgressive power?
In the end, I don't care how true the events are, or how accurate the portrayal of his mindstate is. It is a great reading experience either way.
The authorial voice is that of the author -New Juche - a Scottish writer, photographer, and self-proclaimed amateur ethnographer, who from a mountain in northern Thailand, recounts his time there, along with past episodes from the seedy underworlds of Phnom Penh and Bangkok.
I was grabbed right away by the bare-bones confessional style. The author is not afraid to lay bare the most intimate details about his psyche, especially his [by most cultural standards] depraved sexual urges.
Be warned, this is transgressive stuff. Many pages of errant sexual behavior will test the resolve of readers. Excessive masturbation, fetishization of amputees, drug-fueled hooker-frenzies, and even a short-lived notion of fancy involving child prostitutes.
Not for the faint of heart.
However, New Juche manages to juxtapose the depravity with bouts of beauty, most often through the mastery of his prose, whose rhythm and tonality are incredibly poised, and capable of describing the vulgarity in a way that makes it not just shocking, but possibly beautiful in its own twisted way.
There are contrasting elements as well; episodes in natural environments of stark beauty and resonance, and dream-like scenes that possess a kind of hallucinogenic power, if indeed the meaning of these tableaux evaded me at times.
It could be said that the book has a kind of "Lolita effect"; the reader is brought to a place where the transgressive thoughts and actions of the speaker seem less and less morally troublesome, the more you are spellbound by the way with words, and the incredible attention to detail in his vision. Only the difference is, that Humbert Humbert is a fictional character, and New Juche is a real person telling us openly about the inner workings of his mind, from which many would be ready to ostracize him from society completely.
I came away from the book thinking New Juche is a bit of a sick fuck, but he made me consider the sick-fuckyness of him with a new sense of sympathy, and that is a great thing for literature to do.
Also, who knows how much he inflated parts of his personality to give the text more verve and raw transgressive power?
In the end, I don't care how true the events are, or how accurate the portrayal of his mindstate is. It is a great reading experience either way.
October 1, 2018
I am fascinated by the work of New Juche, from "Stupid Baby" to "Mountainhead". Mainly because of how it is written, it is absolutely intoxicating and inventive no matter how depraved the subject matter. Here, in "Mountainhead" the mountain makes the narrator pursue a life away from the city and towards the mountain that dictates his obsessions and desire to become one with it - which towards the end becomes the most moving section of prose to me. The photographs as well are beautiful and bookmark each chapter.
March 28, 2025
In het begin dacht ik: wat voor een weerzinwekkende, bij momenten zelfs perverse literatuur ben ik hier aan het lezen. Na een pagina of vijftig merkte ik dat ik dit boek niet meer kon wegleggen. Nog nooit las ik zoiets.
Scabreus is een gigantisch understatement, maar op zo’n manier geschreven dat het vooral fascinerend blijft. Weird.
Scabreus is een gigantisch understatement, maar op zo’n manier geschreven dat het vooral fascinerend blijft. Weird.
July 7, 2018
It’s the most extraordinary confessional. Certain lines in Mountainhead are heartstoppingly gorgeous and if these moments are overlaid with any that might engender rank disgust, then such is the price of admission to the author’s unique worldview. Rest assured you won’t be sorry and this book is very highly recommended.
September 6, 2022
Mountainhead is a filthy ode to the metaphysics of masturbation, a depraved collection of vivid and increasingly incoherent anecdotes depicting the author's quest to find the locus around which the hedonic world revolves.
It isn't a long-form articulate rehash your friend's ribald Thailand holiday stories: they might feature the same disfigured hookers and dirty powders, sure, but your friend eventually had his fill and came home. New Juche emerged on the other end not sated but seeking to go yet deeper.
If orgasm is la petite mort, New Juche’s furious wanking in putrid public toilet stalls is la petite suicide. He's looking for annihilation in a slum hovel’s bathroom for 5 baht a pop. He's cruising down potholed third world roads hoping to find a gas station selling pineal gland extract by the liter so he can fill up a water bottle and huff it. He's no dilettante — he's searching for the heart of coomerism so he can rip it out and take a bite while it's still beating.
Does he find it? Not for me to say.
It isn't a long-form articulate rehash your friend's ribald Thailand holiday stories: they might feature the same disfigured hookers and dirty powders, sure, but your friend eventually had his fill and came home. New Juche emerged on the other end not sated but seeking to go yet deeper.
If orgasm is la petite mort, New Juche’s furious wanking in putrid public toilet stalls is la petite suicide. He's looking for annihilation in a slum hovel’s bathroom for 5 baht a pop. He's cruising down potholed third world roads hoping to find a gas station selling pineal gland extract by the liter so he can fill up a water bottle and huff it. He's no dilettante — he's searching for the heart of coomerism so he can rip it out and take a bite while it's still beating.
Does he find it? Not for me to say.
Read
July 6, 2023This is a travelogue. A travelogue with a big difference. You’ve been warned.
Mountainhead is a journal. It’s autofiction. It’s memoir. It’s confession. It’s a challenge. A challenge for the reader, particularly in how much they can endure of the depraved narration of New Juche’s travels.
Juche explores various themes that thread together to paint an overarching picture when you step back from the work. The links between nature and human nature. Pornography and it’s numbing effects on particularly susceptible folk. This numbing effect creating a detachment for the narrator that leads to them finding value only in body parts. The journal is almost a reversion into primal nature. There couldn’t be a more apt environment for a person to revert into a primal being than in the jungle.
I have an image in my head of an innocent soul plucking this from the travel section of their local bookshop and then having nightmares for weeks on end. They’ll still make it to the final pages, of course, because they may not enjoy the detail in what they’re reading, but there’s no way they’ll be putting it down.
This is my first experience of New Juche’s work. I read the book a couple of weeks ago when writing this review, and I can’t wipe it from my memory.
The prose is totally purpurate in fashion, without ever slipping into the totally purple. Sordid thoughts and experiences are on show throughout, to the point that I would trace back over sentences now and then to fully consume and understand what I’d read. I’m no stranger to dark narrations, and they rarely ever bother me. I don’t think this had a lasting effect on me because of its darkness; more so it was the coupling of these dirty descriptions with such elegant language that strook me as different, new, and juchey.
I fully believe, on the basis of this work alone, that you could plonk New Juche down in a white, bare room, with only a notebook and a pen at hand, and they could write 200+ pages on their surroundings, wrap it up in a bow, and deliver it to print immediately. I wanted this book to go on forever and I suppose that says a lot about me.
Finding a new author that you can really enjoy is such an almighty shot of serotonin - I recommend it for everyone.
Fantastic left-field work from a writer who I hope continues to write for many years to come.
Mountainhead is a journal. It’s autofiction. It’s memoir. It’s confession. It’s a challenge. A challenge for the reader, particularly in how much they can endure of the depraved narration of New Juche’s travels.
Juche explores various themes that thread together to paint an overarching picture when you step back from the work. The links between nature and human nature. Pornography and it’s numbing effects on particularly susceptible folk. This numbing effect creating a detachment for the narrator that leads to them finding value only in body parts. The journal is almost a reversion into primal nature. There couldn’t be a more apt environment for a person to revert into a primal being than in the jungle.
I have an image in my head of an innocent soul plucking this from the travel section of their local bookshop and then having nightmares for weeks on end. They’ll still make it to the final pages, of course, because they may not enjoy the detail in what they’re reading, but there’s no way they’ll be putting it down.
This is my first experience of New Juche’s work. I read the book a couple of weeks ago when writing this review, and I can’t wipe it from my memory.
The prose is totally purpurate in fashion, without ever slipping into the totally purple. Sordid thoughts and experiences are on show throughout, to the point that I would trace back over sentences now and then to fully consume and understand what I’d read. I’m no stranger to dark narrations, and they rarely ever bother me. I don’t think this had a lasting effect on me because of its darkness; more so it was the coupling of these dirty descriptions with such elegant language that strook me as different, new, and juchey.
I fully believe, on the basis of this work alone, that you could plonk New Juche down in a white, bare room, with only a notebook and a pen at hand, and they could write 200+ pages on their surroundings, wrap it up in a bow, and deliver it to print immediately. I wanted this book to go on forever and I suppose that says a lot about me.
Finding a new author that you can really enjoy is such an almighty shot of serotonin - I recommend it for everyone.
Fantastic left-field work from a writer who I hope continues to write for many years to come.
June 24, 2018
A fascinating and immersive mixture of intense travelogue, self-discovery via unflinching self-scrutiny and feats of physical endurance, and meditations on prostitution and lifelong sexual obsession. The writing itself is gorgeous, vivid and lush, full of surprising poetry. Very distinctive, highly recommended.
February 2, 2020
hard to grapple with the fact that the intensity of this loathing critique, this compassionate hatred of not just this individual but The Individual, the revolting narcissism of this fascist weakness, is in each bristling moment neither houllebecq nor bataille but autobiography. i desperately want to talk about this book but i can not recommend it despite its suppurating beauty.
November 2, 2020
"I promise I am really trying very hard here to develop a body of text possessed of more than one dimension." - New Juche, herein self-condemned
Though I wanted to put it down 100 times, there was something just mesmerizing enough about it to force me to drag on through this onanistic travelogue. Can't quite tell if that's in this book's favor or not. So it gets a second star.
Though I wanted to put it down 100 times, there was something just mesmerizing enough about it to force me to drag on through this onanistic travelogue. Can't quite tell if that's in this book's favor or not. So it gets a second star.
July 16, 2025
Picked this up out of curiosity given the warnings by different lit influencers. Found it interesting and engaging from a kind of clinical perspective. New Juche is talented and broke through my usual wall when it comes to fiction ( perhaps bc years of hearing real narratives will always be more mind blowing than most fiction?)… he creates this memoir-like immersion in a south East Asian location and merges elements of disgust and aversion with eroticism and numinosity. Seems to be talented enough to be intellectually linked to Batailles, Sade, Conrad, Lacan, Rimbaud and Freud, to name a few. New Juche dares to write about the transcendent Eros of forgotten places and people. Not an easy read. Disturbing at times and uncomfortable. Yet raises a lot of philosophical questions.
December 12, 2018
I first read New Juche (Stupid Baby) when I ordered a handful of titles from the small publisher Amphetamine Sulphate, and it was surprisingly more well-written than I was expecting (I don't expect the most literary bent from musicians/noise boiz-cum-authors), so I ordered Mountainhead soon after. There are a few scenes bordering fiction that pretty much solidify that this is not to be taken as total autobiography.
This novel continues the general themes of Juche's Stupid Baby - sex tourism in Thailand, failed and failing relationships with the locals, the vicissitudes of life in Bangkok - although this narrative is centered in the mountains of Northern Thailand. Similar filth, depravity, and abasement occur here across Juche's travels in Thailand and Cambodia, and a few run-ins with the criminal world and the police, notorious for extortion.
Juche has a penchant for the poor and the abject, hence his constant acquaintance and relations with prostitutes, as well as those most would deem undesirable, to put it gently. But here in Mountainhead this sexual communion is shared with the landscape as well - Juche frequently masturbates in nature, and, in one scene, ejaculates onto the sand, collects the congealed glob of earth, rubs it on his face, then puts a portion of it in his mouth. Erections abound as well, as though the beauty of the mountain itself compelled him to sexual arousal.
Juche is a photographer as well, favoring the ugliness and desolation of local environs and their inhabitants, although here pictures of the mountain serve as visual refrains between chapters so that we might relish the beauty of the natural landscapes Juche himself has become so enamored with and aroused by, to the literal point of sexual release.
This novel continues the general themes of Juche's Stupid Baby - sex tourism in Thailand, failed and failing relationships with the locals, the vicissitudes of life in Bangkok - although this narrative is centered in the mountains of Northern Thailand. Similar filth, depravity, and abasement occur here across Juche's travels in Thailand and Cambodia, and a few run-ins with the criminal world and the police, notorious for extortion.
Juche has a penchant for the poor and the abject, hence his constant acquaintance and relations with prostitutes, as well as those most would deem undesirable, to put it gently. But here in Mountainhead this sexual communion is shared with the landscape as well - Juche frequently masturbates in nature, and, in one scene, ejaculates onto the sand, collects the congealed glob of earth, rubs it on his face, then puts a portion of it in his mouth. Erections abound as well, as though the beauty of the mountain itself compelled him to sexual arousal.
Juche is a photographer as well, favoring the ugliness and desolation of local environs and their inhabitants, although here pictures of the mountain serve as visual refrains between chapters so that we might relish the beauty of the natural landscapes Juche himself has become so enamored with and aroused by, to the literal point of sexual release.
April 23, 2022
Mountainhead is New Juche’s memoir of his time in Cambodia (or one part of it) in which be blends the lush vegetation of the rural mountainside with the dismal life of poverty, prostitution, drunkenness, feral ablutions in communion with nature, and lots of masturbation. Dissolute and self-destructive lives of ex-pats living in slums with prostitutes isn’t new but morbid fascination keep my eyes open to its documentation.
New Juche is not a sex tourist of underage girls pawned for cash by impoverished families but instead he prefers old, obese women and some men (and rather than pimps, with extended families to maintain): a bisexual who seems made of equal parts anger and awe (“awe” in a sense akin to William Burroughs’s love of sewer stench). His drug intake seems largely limited to alcohol and cigarettes, with an occasional petrol-huffing chaser, and his means of financial support are invisible. His descriptions of bar fights sound like the enactment of S. Clay Wilson drawings.
Mountainhead exemplifies a type of toxic masculinity you won’t find in the pages Hemingway, any more than you’ll find honest depictions of bull fights among them. Heterosexual men without women are not necessarily worse behaving than men with women, but in the degraded and degrading putrefaction of semi-lawless poverty, most behavioral restraints—even the disapproving eyes of neighbors—are lax, gone, or on leave.
For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...
New Juche is not a sex tourist of underage girls pawned for cash by impoverished families but instead he prefers old, obese women and some men (and rather than pimps, with extended families to maintain): a bisexual who seems made of equal parts anger and awe (“awe” in a sense akin to William Burroughs’s love of sewer stench). His drug intake seems largely limited to alcohol and cigarettes, with an occasional petrol-huffing chaser, and his means of financial support are invisible. His descriptions of bar fights sound like the enactment of S. Clay Wilson drawings.
Mountainhead exemplifies a type of toxic masculinity you won’t find in the pages Hemingway, any more than you’ll find honest depictions of bull fights among them. Heterosexual men without women are not necessarily worse behaving than men with women, but in the degraded and degrading putrefaction of semi-lawless poverty, most behavioral restraints—even the disapproving eyes of neighbors—are lax, gone, or on leave.
For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...
December 11, 2019
"I lower myself gently into exquisite discomfort when I look at the details and peculiarities of my own body through the eyes of women I've fucked. I can't have women suck my cock now. It's far too complicated, and complicating. I don't like to smoke cigarettes in hotel rooms anymore, even after I've come. I lie curled up on my side sweating, anxious, the effort of showering and leaving the room hanging over me like a day at work, trying to think through how I will bid the woman goodnight and good luck. What specific words I should use. Look at her stuff folded there, handbag on top of high heels and bra, and her mobile phone with a sort of keyring thing. It's an incredible, draining effort to face it. But I must."
an absolute scorcher, probably the best thing i've read this year. following my buddy N.J. into the mountain, and back out, amid reflections of guilt over fumbling degeneracy. you could slap a lot of "post-"s onto this i guess, it's just beautiful writing about ugliness that has a lot more of a conscience than the willfully "edgy" stuff it could be lumped in with (which i also like too! just saying this is better!) while avoiding being a self-congratulatory guilt diatribe. the writing is lush and evocative when he discusses his surroundings, and blunt and lucid when discussing the fauna. will never look at scorpions the same.
an absolute scorcher, probably the best thing i've read this year. following my buddy N.J. into the mountain, and back out, amid reflections of guilt over fumbling degeneracy. you could slap a lot of "post-"s onto this i guess, it's just beautiful writing about ugliness that has a lot more of a conscience than the willfully "edgy" stuff it could be lumped in with (which i also like too! just saying this is better!) while avoiding being a self-congratulatory guilt diatribe. the writing is lush and evocative when he discusses his surroundings, and blunt and lucid when discussing the fauna. will never look at scorpions the same.
July 19, 2022
Vivid, incredible, contains a multitude of vibrant, visceral scenes I will never forget. New Juche is a master
December 19, 2022
as concerned with filth and fluids on a zoological level as Ballard’s Crash. another to file under: books you can smell.
October 10, 2023
"mountainhead" introduces a radically disruptive third term to an originally straightforward seeming cultural dialectic: in Tony Duvert's "Diary of an Innocent" we see a man, grounded, at ease and in his element, and able to have sex with children; but in the writings of Peter Sotos generally, we see a man alienated and furious at his own alienation, always-already-incomplete, a prisoner of a phenomenal continuum based fundamentally on the Abrahamic curse of the hideous/mundane/temporary body, and denied sexual encounters with children.
however, new juche finds such encounters readily available, and yet does not want them. in this merge we find a man with the sexual compulsions and dehumanizing fixations of Sotos, with an abject embodiment of experience and experience of Place that genuinely exceeds Duvert's. the man of the future.
it is not my favorite work of autofiction about sex tourism in the global south that i have read this year, but the prose is as gorgeous and entrancing as i was hearing people claim it to be, which surprised me. especially in the more hallucinatory sections of encounters with nature. the section on "the cubicle of the angel of hitler" is one of the more incredible things ive ever read
however, new juche finds such encounters readily available, and yet does not want them. in this merge we find a man with the sexual compulsions and dehumanizing fixations of Sotos, with an abject embodiment of experience and experience of Place that genuinely exceeds Duvert's. the man of the future.
it is not my favorite work of autofiction about sex tourism in the global south that i have read this year, but the prose is as gorgeous and entrancing as i was hearing people claim it to be, which surprised me. especially in the more hallucinatory sections of encounters with nature. the section on "the cubicle of the angel of hitler" is one of the more incredible things ive ever read
June 18, 2022
A decadent book, fully about a narrator’s pleasure but also a playing out of interminable fetish… literally an ekphrases of a lust-for-life, subject/object blurred besides the forever coming phallus, whores, southeast Asian geography
3 stars cause it was tough for my attention deficit brain to glean a share of pleasure comparable to the novel’s speaker, and frankly I’m eager to move onto another work… tho I’ll be revisiting New Juche again
A quote from the end, the denouement after a spiritually/psychedelically For Real bacchanal: “I think, that I've become so dedicated a medium of images that I can no longer live fully. Like an earthworm, I consume and excrete simultaneously and continuously, within the same act as moving. My consumption propels me forward. Masturbation is a feminine act. Within the cell, in my retreat, the sexual act is inverted: the image asserts itself over me, and I masturbate not to it, but under it. It is hard, permanent and clarified, still without mercy, and I flutter around it toothlessly, like the efforts of a mosquito at a statue of marble, it yields nothing other than the vision of its Apollonian appendages.”
3 stars cause it was tough for my attention deficit brain to glean a share of pleasure comparable to the novel’s speaker, and frankly I’m eager to move onto another work… tho I’ll be revisiting New Juche again
A quote from the end, the denouement after a spiritually/psychedelically For Real bacchanal: “I think, that I've become so dedicated a medium of images that I can no longer live fully. Like an earthworm, I consume and excrete simultaneously and continuously, within the same act as moving. My consumption propels me forward. Masturbation is a feminine act. Within the cell, in my retreat, the sexual act is inverted: the image asserts itself over me, and I masturbate not to it, but under it. It is hard, permanent and clarified, still without mercy, and I flutter around it toothlessly, like the efforts of a mosquito at a statue of marble, it yields nothing other than the vision of its Apollonian appendages.”
April 23, 2021
What have I done? My first impression was that this writing is an alchemical act of lyrical transformation, taking the worst curdling rot of human existence and transforming it into a piece of word-art. Upon further reflection it seems equally as though the elements of nauseous selfless hedonism drag pretty words through the offal-sloshing gutter. I can't recommend this, on the grounds that it would reflect poorly on my character that I enjoyed reading it, which I did, against my better judgement.
November 4, 2022
I wasn’t sure how to feel when I first cracked this one; it is full of real depravity, so so subversive. However, the writing is so fuckin good, you guys - I can’t explain it. Something to do with contradiction, self awareness. Nearly frightening at times. A lot of primal shit here, lots of mystery. Not really any macho posturing which was thrilling to me considering how obsessed this dude is with his dick. Lots of people will hate this book but if you read it I want to talk about it so hit me up! I felt a bit slumpy reading-wise and this book blew my head off.
February 3, 2021
New Juche is a pumping powerhouse of a prose artist and this is my first foray into his art, a highly unusual travelogue cum memoir detailing his travels and exploits in SE Asia that rewards the daring with exceptional writing and disturbing content.
March 8, 2019
Absolutely stunning. Sleazy, poetic and oh so vibrant. I could smell the book while reading it.
September 18, 2019
Some of the most honest writing (and visceral prose) I've seen in a long time.
March 20, 2020
eye opening.
December 20, 2020
This guy is really problematic and also obsessed with his dick to a hilarious degree, but he is a great writer and strangely compelling to read.
October 9, 2024
3.5/5
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