Under the Volcano
by Malcolm Lowry
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The acclaimed classic about one fatal day in a small Mexican town, hailed by the Modern Library as one of the one hundred best English novels of the twentieth century Former British consul Geoffrey Firmin lives alone with his demons in the shadow of two active volcanoes in South Central Mexico. Gripped by alcoholism, Geoffrey makes one last effort to salvage his crumbling life on the day that his ex-wife, Yvonne, arrives in town. It's the Day of the Dead, 1938. The couple wants to revive show more their marriage and undo the wrongs of their past, but they soon realize that they've stumbled into the wrong place and time, where not only Geoffrey and Yvonne, but the world itself is on the edge of Armageddon. Under the Volcano stands as an iconic and richly drawn example of the modern novel at its most lyrical. show lessTags
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Member Recommendations
mArC0 Self-destruction through alcohol and denial;
Write what you know: both protagonists destroy themselves though alcohol and denial.
20
WSB7 Strong perspectival imagery overhanging(pursuing?)a doomed hero.
laura.aviva Both have incredible writing and often require a dictionary, which happens to be my favorite kind of book. Alcoholic outsiders hell bent on isolating themselves from all that they hold dear. Riveting.
Member Reviews
Towards the nightmarish conclusion of Under the Volcano, Yvonne recognizes that the drinks "lay like swine on her soul." That poetic glimpse into Bacchic darkness is a glimpse of the novel's mastery, It is impossible to distinguish it only as a novel about alcoholism, or, even, a return to the primoridal Eden besieged by History's jackboots. Under the Volcano is so much more than that. Each of the principal characters exposes their soul, yet motivations remain dim, much like the fetid cantinas and the dubious mescal.
The novel's poetry is electrically animated and emerges from the pages like Promethean firestorms. Pedestrian brains will find themselves winded and unnerved by the pyrotechnics. I know I was. Consider me grateful for such.
The novel's poetry is electrically animated and emerges from the pages like Promethean firestorms. Pedestrian brains will find themselves winded and unnerved by the pyrotechnics. I know I was. Consider me grateful for such.
Detailing the final hours of a lucid drunk, Under the Volcano takes place over the course of a single day. Its main character, Geoffrey Firmin, is a British ex-consul to Mexico in the 1930s, and on his last day he’s at the end of a years-long journey towards near-constant inebriation, a process in which he’s lost his job, his wife, and his coherence. The day opens with his wife returning, ready to give it another shot, and takes the reader through the Garden of Eden, musings on comparative mythology, a bus ride interrupted by a dead, police-beaten Indian, a bullfight, and a wander through the jungle. All of it takes place on the Day of the Dead, and all of it is drenched in sweaty delirium tremens and unrelenting psychosis, show more punctuated by blackouts. The text veers wildly across the pages, from memory to hallucination to overheard dialogue to inner self-strangulation -- the prose is a veritable frenzy. Coherence and understanding are kept at arm’s length. Stretches of rule books, tourist folders, radio announcements, letters and street signs are incorporated into the prose without warning, and fragments of memories and dialogue are given in multiple untranslated languages (especially Spanish, but also French and German. I love that kind of thing, but I can imagine not everyone does).
This was not a pleasant read, nor was it intended to be. Lowry’s depiction of the inner life of a long-term alcoholic is very impressive, and it is worth reading.
I’m only giving this three and a half stars, though, because I thought Lowry overdid things in other aspects of the book. The many ways in which he tried to throw in Kabbalistic elements, or Biblical references (and Goethe, and various philosophers, etc.), I felt, were a stretch: they did not work for me. Then there was the insistence on grandeur and universality that the book wants to lend its story. I thought was overdone, too: Under the Volcano is the story of a wealthy Western drunk in Mexico: there really is no need to pretend this is particularly poignant among the poverty, the oppression and the corruption regularly at display in 1930s Mexico. I think what I disliked most about this book is that Lowry seemed to be aware that he was writing a masterpiece and tried to make it An Important Book -- hence the literary references and the grandeur. show less
This was not a pleasant read, nor was it intended to be. Lowry’s depiction of the inner life of a long-term alcoholic is very impressive, and it is worth reading.
I’m only giving this three and a half stars, though, because I thought Lowry overdid things in other aspects of the book. The many ways in which he tried to throw in Kabbalistic elements, or Biblical references (and Goethe, and various philosophers, etc.), I felt, were a stretch: they did not work for me. Then there was the insistence on grandeur and universality that the book wants to lend its story. I thought was overdone, too: Under the Volcano is the story of a wealthy Western drunk in Mexico: there really is no need to pretend this is particularly poignant among the poverty, the oppression and the corruption regularly at display in 1930s Mexico. I think what I disliked most about this book is that Lowry seemed to be aware that he was writing a masterpiece and tried to make it An Important Book -- hence the literary references and the grandeur. show less
The very first thing you notice about Under the Volcano is the luxurious writing. Lowry's use of language is like sinking in a deep bed of velvet. You fall in and keep falling until you can't extract yourself from the words very easily. Listening to this an audio made it a little more difficult because of the various languages spoken and the switching of points of views. I can understand written Spanish much better than the spoken language.
The very first chapter sets the stage for the following eleven chapters. It is November 2nd 1940 in Quauhnahuac, Mexico and two men are reminiscing about the British Consul, Geoffrey Firmin. Chapter two takes us back exactly one year and we follow Firmin's activities for one short day. Be prepared for show more a pathetic man's sad Day in the Life. His ex-wife has just returned to Mexico from an extended stay in America in an effort to reconcile with Firmin but ends up having a better time with his half brother. All the while the Consul is drinking, drinking, drinking. It is tragic how he argues with himself about that one last drink. There are mysterious dogs, runaway horses, bullfighting, and of course, the ever present volcanoes. Warning, but not a real spoiler alert: this doesn't end well for anyone. show less
The very first chapter sets the stage for the following eleven chapters. It is November 2nd 1940 in Quauhnahuac, Mexico and two men are reminiscing about the British Consul, Geoffrey Firmin. Chapter two takes us back exactly one year and we follow Firmin's activities for one short day. Be prepared for show more a pathetic man's sad Day in the Life. His ex-wife has just returned to Mexico from an extended stay in America in an effort to reconcile with Firmin but ends up having a better time with his half brother. All the while the Consul is drinking, drinking, drinking. It is tragic how he argues with himself about that one last drink. There are mysterious dogs, runaway horses, bullfighting, and of course, the ever present volcanoes. Warning, but not a real spoiler alert: this doesn't end well for anyone. show less
The Consul decapitated a dusty coquelicot poppy growing by the side of the gutter with his stick.
One of Under the Volcano's smaller sentences, but isn't it perfectly-formed? The parade of plosives in the violent first half, petering out into plainness. At the other end of the spectrum is the head-spinning whirlpool of a sentence that opens Chapter 3, diverting the reader's attention, like the Consul's, from the world of objects to the eddying, allusive world of appearances. The writing is sometimes obscure because obscurity is its objective, the obscure, secretive self-deception of the alcoholic. But these misapprehensions, constructed of the endless, sometimes paranoid (but often not) recombination of a few simple motifs and symbols, show more add up to a reality more cogent, on its own terms, than the outside world, with its imminent apocalypse (see the last words of the antepenultimate sentence of the book). Can you blame the Consul for escaping to a mezcal Disneyland?
The symbols, as I say, aren't hard to fathom. Take gardens — the Consul's (literally undermined) garden, run to riot in the absence of Yvonne, an "indescribable confusion of briars from which the Consul averted his eyes...", complete with snakes literal and metaphorical. The little municipal garden next door whose admonitory sign the Consul ironically miscontrues. Yvonne's cowboy riding style which is "not as in gardens". The stone-faced "Chief of Gardens" who decides the Consul's fate at the Farolito. Or take the Farolito itself — "the lighthouse that invites the storm, and lights it!" — an emblem of salvation but also of isolation and the risk of foundering. Images of horses abound, like the "uncontrolled" horse with its blotto rider seen by Laruelle in Chapter 1, various equine descriptions of nature ("dark swift horses surging up the sky", "white horses westward marked where the real sea began"), Geoff's description of himself as "still strong as a horse", and of course (a horse, of course) the fateful, 7-branded horse encountered four times by different characters. We aren't told its colour, but white would make sense.
My point is the prose might be difficult (though I think it just takes getting used to) but the symbols and the ideas are not. This is a book about perdition vs. redemption, agency vs. fatalism, and booze. These themes snake in and out of each other, chase each other's tails. The Consul has abandoned himself to fate (absolutamente necesario), his hands beyond his control whether shaking for lack of a drink or reaching ineluctably for the next one (just like Orlac the pianist's hands in the film, grafted onto his arms by Peter Lorre's mad scientist and inclined to enact the murderous urges of their original owner). Hugh wants to shape his fate but is increasingly doubtful of his ability to do so (the preoccupying battle of the Ebro and his non-participation). He fears, suspects, that his brother is right when he spits, in their final rupture at the Salon Ofélia, "freedom—of course there is nothing of the sort, really". And yet Geoffrey is deluded, too, delusively insisting on his freedom to decline the next drink. Even the environment equivocates — at one point, while a steady breeze obtains in one direction, "the leeward side" of the house "swayed imperceptibly, as to another control..."
The novel's polyphony and use of intrusive text — snatches of overheard conversations, radio, print ads, the tourist brochures with which the Consul wipes his ass —makes it realistic and borracho at the same time. Many of its detractors complain about its use of stream of consciousness, but there's very little real SoC as one finds in Ulysses or The Waves. The dominant discourse is free, indirect, and really not difficult to follow. To take an example at random: "The Consul sat perfectly still staring at the floor while the enormity of the insult passed into his soul. As if, as if, as if, he were not sober now!" I mean, Austen writes that way and no one complains that she's hard to understand! There are very few unusual words (nutant, tabid, thalavethiparothiam — handy additions to anyone's vocab, I'm sure you'll agree) and several funny scenes, like the Consul's drunken conversation with his white-bread American neighbour, (not de) Quincey, or when, Withnailesque, he takes a swig of bay rum:
Before Hugh could stop him the Consul took a large drink. "Not bad. Not at all bad," he added triumphantly, smacking his lips. "If slightly underproof... [...] Wait a minute, I’m going to be—"
I laughed, too, at Hugh's ditty on silly prairie place names ("take me back to dear old Horsefly/ Aneroid or Gravelburg") and Dr. Vigil's endearing, Learlike "Guanajuato is sited in a beautiful circus of steepy hills". But it's Lowry's long, lyrical passages that I like best, e.g. Yvonne's imagining of their future shack in idyllic Dollarton:
And at half-tide they would look down from their pier and see, in the shallow lucid water, turquoise and vermilion and purple starfish, and small brown velvet crabs sidling among barnacled stones brocaded like heart-shaped pincushions.
It's a satisfyingly constructed book, too, although that first, posthumous, scene-setting episode with Laruelle and Vigil still sits awkwardly in the purported 12-hour, 12-chapter schema. The scene where Hugh shaves the DT-stricken Consul, right at the center of the book ("Hugh shaved adroitly along the edge of his brother’s beard, past the jugular vein and the carotid artery") feels pivotal, the closest the two of them (really the author at two periods of his life) come to each other in their peregrinations, fraught with tenderness and the lethal potential of the blade. And no book captures the varieties of bibulous experience so well. The thrilling joy of it ("the Consul felt the fire of the tequila run down his spine like lightning striking a tree which thereupon, miraculously, blossoms"), the befuddledness of it, the dissolution of surfaces, the soul-trampling crapulous times. If ever a novel exemplified the "affluence of incohol", this is it:
...not even the gates of heaven, opening wide to receive me, could fill me with such celestial complicated and hopeless joy as the iron screen that rolls up with a crash, as the unpadlocked jalousies which admit those whose souls tremble with the drinks they carry unsteadily to their lips. All mystery, all hope, all disappointment, yes, all disaster, is here, beyond those swinging doors.
Dolente... dolore...
The first time I read Under the Volcano I knew I loved it, but not exactly why. The second time, 10+ years ago, the book's baroque weft of symbols started to come into focus, and I knew why I loved it, but also how little I understood. And with this third reading, I felt at home in its dense jungle of language and signs, although still quite far from grasping every interconnection. It's something of a cliché that "great books teach you how to read them", although true of most of my favourites. But UtV (or any other book) isn't good because it's hard — its quality and its difficulty both arise from its density, from the intensity of experience, inner and outer, that's packed into its pages. Here's to the next read — y tiempo para disfrutarlo. show less
One of Under the Volcano's smaller sentences, but isn't it perfectly-formed? The parade of plosives in the violent first half, petering out into plainness. At the other end of the spectrum is the head-spinning whirlpool of a sentence that opens Chapter 3, diverting the reader's attention, like the Consul's, from the world of objects to the eddying, allusive world of appearances. The writing is sometimes obscure because obscurity is its objective, the obscure, secretive self-deception of the alcoholic. But these misapprehensions, constructed of the endless, sometimes paranoid (but often not) recombination of a few simple motifs and symbols, show more add up to a reality more cogent, on its own terms, than the outside world, with its imminent apocalypse (see the last words of the antepenultimate sentence of the book). Can you blame the Consul for escaping to a mezcal Disneyland?
The symbols, as I say, aren't hard to fathom. Take gardens — the Consul's (literally undermined) garden, run to riot in the absence of Yvonne, an "indescribable confusion of briars from which the Consul averted his eyes...", complete with snakes literal and metaphorical. The little municipal garden next door whose admonitory sign the Consul ironically miscontrues. Yvonne's cowboy riding style which is "not as in gardens". The stone-faced "Chief of Gardens" who decides the Consul's fate at the Farolito. Or take the Farolito itself — "the lighthouse that invites the storm, and lights it!" — an emblem of salvation but also of isolation and the risk of foundering. Images of horses abound, like the "uncontrolled" horse with its blotto rider seen by Laruelle in Chapter 1, various equine descriptions of nature ("dark swift horses surging up the sky", "white horses westward marked where the real sea began"), Geoff's description of himself as "still strong as a horse", and of course (a horse, of course) the fateful, 7-branded horse encountered four times by different characters. We aren't told its colour, but white would make sense.
My point is the prose might be difficult (though I think it just takes getting used to) but the symbols and the ideas are not. This is a book about perdition vs. redemption, agency vs. fatalism, and booze. These themes snake in and out of each other, chase each other's tails. The Consul has abandoned himself to fate (absolutamente necesario), his hands beyond his control whether shaking for lack of a drink or reaching ineluctably for the next one (just like Orlac the pianist's hands in the film, grafted onto his arms by Peter Lorre's mad scientist and inclined to enact the murderous urges of their original owner). Hugh wants to shape his fate but is increasingly doubtful of his ability to do so (the preoccupying battle of the Ebro and his non-participation). He fears, suspects, that his brother is right when he spits, in their final rupture at the Salon Ofélia, "freedom—of course there is nothing of the sort, really". And yet Geoffrey is deluded, too, delusively insisting on his freedom to decline the next drink. Even the environment equivocates — at one point, while a steady breeze obtains in one direction, "the leeward side" of the house "swayed imperceptibly, as to another control..."
The novel's polyphony and use of intrusive text — snatches of overheard conversations, radio, print ads, the tourist brochures with which the Consul wipes his ass —makes it realistic and borracho at the same time. Many of its detractors complain about its use of stream of consciousness, but there's very little real SoC as one finds in Ulysses or The Waves. The dominant discourse is free, indirect, and really not difficult to follow. To take an example at random: "The Consul sat perfectly still staring at the floor while the enormity of the insult passed into his soul. As if, as if, as if, he were not sober now!" I mean, Austen writes that way and no one complains that she's hard to understand! There are very few unusual words (nutant, tabid, thalavethiparothiam — handy additions to anyone's vocab, I'm sure you'll agree) and several funny scenes, like the Consul's drunken conversation with his white-bread American neighbour, (not de) Quincey, or when, Withnailesque, he takes a swig of bay rum:
Before Hugh could stop him the Consul took a large drink. "Not bad. Not at all bad," he added triumphantly, smacking his lips. "If slightly underproof... [...] Wait a minute, I’m going to be—"
I laughed, too, at Hugh's ditty on silly prairie place names ("take me back to dear old Horsefly/ Aneroid or Gravelburg") and Dr. Vigil's endearing, Learlike "Guanajuato is sited in a beautiful circus of steepy hills". But it's Lowry's long, lyrical passages that I like best, e.g. Yvonne's imagining of their future shack in idyllic Dollarton:
And at half-tide they would look down from their pier and see, in the shallow lucid water, turquoise and vermilion and purple starfish, and small brown velvet crabs sidling among barnacled stones brocaded like heart-shaped pincushions.
It's a satisfyingly constructed book, too, although that first, posthumous, scene-setting episode with Laruelle and Vigil still sits awkwardly in the purported 12-hour, 12-chapter schema. The scene where Hugh shaves the DT-stricken Consul, right at the center of the book ("Hugh shaved adroitly along the edge of his brother’s beard, past the jugular vein and the carotid artery") feels pivotal, the closest the two of them (really the author at two periods of his life) come to each other in their peregrinations, fraught with tenderness and the lethal potential of the blade. And no book captures the varieties of bibulous experience so well. The thrilling joy of it ("the Consul felt the fire of the tequila run down his spine like lightning striking a tree which thereupon, miraculously, blossoms"), the befuddledness of it, the dissolution of surfaces, the soul-trampling crapulous times. If ever a novel exemplified the "affluence of incohol", this is it:
...not even the gates of heaven, opening wide to receive me, could fill me with such celestial complicated and hopeless joy as the iron screen that rolls up with a crash, as the unpadlocked jalousies which admit those whose souls tremble with the drinks they carry unsteadily to their lips. All mystery, all hope, all disappointment, yes, all disaster, is here, beyond those swinging doors.
Dolente... dolore...
The first time I read Under the Volcano I knew I loved it, but not exactly why. The second time, 10+ years ago, the book's baroque weft of symbols started to come into focus, and I knew why I loved it, but also how little I understood. And with this third reading, I felt at home in its dense jungle of language and signs, although still quite far from grasping every interconnection. It's something of a cliché that "great books teach you how to read them", although true of most of my favourites. But UtV (or any other book) isn't good because it's hard — its quality and its difficulty both arise from its density, from the intensity of experience, inner and outer, that's packed into its pages. Here's to the next read — y tiempo para disfrutarlo. show less
It’s funny that [b:Infinite Jest|6759|Infinite Jest|David Foster Wallace|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1446876799s/6759.jpg|3271542] should have cited ‘Under the Volcano’ as a depressing book, because that is precisely the novel it most reminded me of. Both are essentially plotless, rife with digressions and flashbacks, cover a small amount of time in uncomfortable detail, and centre on difficult-to-like characters with serious substance abuse problems. On the other hand, both are also curiously compelling and fascinating due to excellent writing. ‘Under the Volcano’ offers actual catharsis, albeit of an extremely downbeat sort, and a clear allegory with the approach of the Second World War. It is incredibly atmospheric show more – every page is pervaded by a claustrophobic air of hopelessness. Obviously this doesn’t make it especially easy to read. The introduction (as ever, to be read afterwards) acknowledges the difficulty of getting into it and then suggests that to really understand Lowry’s genius you should read it three or four times. I respectfully decline to do this. Once was enough to appreciate his craft as a writer and sense the horrible depths of his alcoholic despair.
The digressions and descriptive asides were my favourite parts of the book, as they sometimes briefly allowed light to pierce the narrative gloom. Lowry’s vignette on Cambridge University is brilliantly insightful and will stay with me. It captures something about the university that still persists and I haven’t found an adequate description of before:
Like much of the rest of the novel, that paragraph is essentially a poem and would read more easily formatted as one:
On a more prosaic note, one reason I struggled to feel sympathy for the former Consul at the centre of the narrative was that he strongly reminded me of Boris Johnson. A rude, garrulous colonialist throwback with thick blonde hair who insults and bullies everyone around him, while appearing pathetically incompetent, you say? One wonders if Boris will find himself in Mexico, drowning his sorrows in mescal, when he finally gets fired as Foreign Secretary. Geoffrey Firmin is unequivocally a broken man, although he retains a delusional self-importance. A very well-realised character, but not a pleasant one. The secondary characters are flimsier, although their weaknesses and self-delusions are also laid bare. Mexico itself is a main character, so vividly and exhaustively described that a bus journey can take up at least a chapter without palling. With writing like this (Lowry; Foster Wallace; [a:Louis-Ferdinand Céline|7869|Louis-Ferdinand Céline|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1474566527p2/7869.jpg]), I can’t help wondering what they might have written had they not been hideously depressed. show less
The digressions and descriptive asides were my favourite parts of the book, as they sometimes briefly allowed light to pierce the narrative gloom. Lowry’s vignette on Cambridge University is brilliantly insightful and will stay with me. It captures something about the university that still persists and I haven’t found an adequate description of before:
Ah, the harbour bells of Cambridge! Whose fountains in moonlight and closed courts and cloisters, whose enduring beauty in its virtuous remote self-assurance, seemed part, less of the loud mosaic of one’s stupid life there, though maintained perhaps by the countless deceitful memories of such lives, than the strange dream of some old monk, eight hundred years dead, whose forbidding house, reared upon piles and stakes driven into the marshy ground, had once shone like a beacon out of the mysterious silence, and solitude of the fens. A dream jealously guarded: Keep off the Grass.
Like much of the rest of the novel, that paragraph is essentially a poem and would read more easily formatted as one:
Ah, the harbour bells of Cambridge!
Whose fountains in moonlight and closed courts and cloisters,
Whose enduring beauty in its virtuous remote self-assurance,
Seemed part, less of the loud mosaic of one’s stupid life there,
Though maintained perhaps by the countless deceitful memories of such lives,
Than the strange dream of some old monk, eight hundred years dead,
Whose forbidding house, reared upon piles and stakes driven into the marshy ground,
Had once shone like a beacon out of the mysterious silence, and solitude of the fens.
A dream jealously guarded: Keep off the Grass.
On a more prosaic note, one reason I struggled to feel sympathy for the former Consul at the centre of the narrative was that he strongly reminded me of Boris Johnson. A rude, garrulous colonialist throwback with thick blonde hair who insults and bullies everyone around him, while appearing pathetically incompetent, you say? One wonders if Boris will find himself in Mexico, drowning his sorrows in mescal, when he finally gets fired as Foreign Secretary. Geoffrey Firmin is unequivocally a broken man, although he retains a delusional self-importance. A very well-realised character, but not a pleasant one. The secondary characters are flimsier, although their weaknesses and self-delusions are also laid bare. Mexico itself is a main character, so vividly and exhaustively described that a bus journey can take up at least a chapter without palling. With writing like this (Lowry; Foster Wallace; [a:Louis-Ferdinand Céline|7869|Louis-Ferdinand Céline|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1474566527p2/7869.jpg]), I can’t help wondering what they might have written had they not been hideously depressed. show less
There. I finished it. I almost didn't. Portions of this book are so disjointed and stream-of-drunkenness and opaque that I often thought of putting it down. But I felt like I'd made a commitment to my book club, the same commitment that caused me to start reading this in the first place, so I pushed on through and finished it. If I were to rate this book on overall readability, I would probably only give it 2 of 5 stars.
On the otherhand, those same troublesome passages are part of the art of this book. It is full of the writer's art. From the construction of the plot, such as it is, to the characters, rich and alive, to the settings, true and vibrant, the book engages and challenges the reader at every turn. That is why casual readers show more may turn away, mystified by the hype. That is why some readers insist it is one of the great works of literature, thereby creating, intentionally or unintentionally, that very same hype. On art alone, I would give this 4 out of 5 stars. I would not give it 5, because it does fail to engage so many readers.
On a personal note, I can't decide if reading this at a more leisurely pace would have made it more or less frustrating. Perhaps the same passages that I rushed through because they made no sense would have been even more incomprehensible with more time analyze.
This is definitely not a fast food book. One might call it literary. That doesn't make it bad or snooty. Just challenging. For now I give it 3 stars (average of 2 and 4). show less
On the otherhand, those same troublesome passages are part of the art of this book. It is full of the writer's art. From the construction of the plot, such as it is, to the characters, rich and alive, to the settings, true and vibrant, the book engages and challenges the reader at every turn. That is why casual readers show more may turn away, mystified by the hype. That is why some readers insist it is one of the great works of literature, thereby creating, intentionally or unintentionally, that very same hype. On art alone, I would give this 4 out of 5 stars. I would not give it 5, because it does fail to engage so many readers.
On a personal note, I can't decide if reading this at a more leisurely pace would have made it more or less frustrating. Perhaps the same passages that I rushed through because they made no sense would have been even more incomprehensible with more time analyze.
This is definitely not a fast food book. One might call it literary. That doesn't make it bad or snooty. Just challenging. For now I give it 3 stars (average of 2 and 4). show less
“Their house was dying, only an agony went there now.”
—Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
Alternately frustrating and beautiful. Discursive and illuminating. Drunk and sober. Efflorescent and dissolving. Ascetic and dissipated. This book can only be described by how I understand it in opposites. I’d imagine it polarized readers upon its release as much as it variably affected the different personalities within myself. Its challenging linguistic forays forced me to learn the correct pronunciations of Popocatepetl and Ixtaccíhuatl, translate Spanish and German passages, brush up on mythology and biblical parables—all while the narrative is intercut with lines from menus, advertisements and multiple inebriated bursts of dialogue. show more It could be confusing, it is confusing, but then the protagonist is a “lucid drunk” (to steal an idea from Stephen Spender’s brilliant introduction). Though moments may have been frustrating and downright annoying, there are blocks of this text that will stick with me forever, images seared into memory, ideas that will most likely never be drowned in a decade of reading more straightforward fiction. The local drunk who stinks, needs to shave and showers your face in spit while gesticulating—sometimes that dude sees something the rest of us don’t and he’s got something worth listening to.
Sometimes. I mean, he is living between a pair of goddamn volcanoes, after all. show less
—Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
Alternately frustrating and beautiful. Discursive and illuminating. Drunk and sober. Efflorescent and dissolving. Ascetic and dissipated. This book can only be described by how I understand it in opposites. I’d imagine it polarized readers upon its release as much as it variably affected the different personalities within myself. Its challenging linguistic forays forced me to learn the correct pronunciations of Popocatepetl and Ixtaccíhuatl, translate Spanish and German passages, brush up on mythology and biblical parables—all while the narrative is intercut with lines from menus, advertisements and multiple inebriated bursts of dialogue. show more It could be confusing, it is confusing, but then the protagonist is a “lucid drunk” (to steal an idea from Stephen Spender’s brilliant introduction). Though moments may have been frustrating and downright annoying, there are blocks of this text that will stick with me forever, images seared into memory, ideas that will most likely never be drowned in a decade of reading more straightforward fiction. The local drunk who stinks, needs to shave and showers your face in spit while gesticulating—sometimes that dude sees something the rest of us don’t and he’s got something worth listening to.
Sometimes. I mean, he is living between a pair of goddamn volcanoes, after all. show less
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Published Reviews
ThingScore 75
Through the three central characters, there is the Joycean outpour of consciousness, a diarrhoeatic total recall, in the search for the cause of their rejection of life, in their rationalization of their self-portraits, in their knowledge of their griefs, despairs, bewilderment. Their casual, veiled conversations, wandering soul searchings, are highlighted against the Mexican setting, and the show more effect, sometimes with a brilliance, is a delirium of phantoms. For sophisticates. show less
added by Richardrobert
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Author Information
71+ Works 6,588 Members
Clarence Malcolm Lowry was born on July 28, 1909 in Cheshire, England. He attended Braeside School, Caldicote School and the Leys School, Cambridge before sailing to the Far East as a deckhand in the summer of 1927. Upon his return in 1929, Lowry settled down to his education, first studying with poet and novelist Conrad Aiken for several months show more and then entering St. Catherine's College, Cambridge University, England. He graduated in 1932 with a B.A. in English and published his first novel, "Ultramarine," in 1933. In 1934, he married Jan Gabrail in Paris, but was tormented by emotional problems. After spending some time in the psychiatric wing of Bellevue Hospital in New York, he began work on his next book, "Lunar Caustic" in 1935. The next year, he and his wife moved to Mexico where he began writing "Under the Volcano." Over the next 10 years, work on the book continued, despite personal crises that included a divorce and remarriage, moves from Mexico to Los Angeles to Vancouver, and the destruction of his home by fire. "Under the Volcano" was finally published in New York on February 19, 1947 and in London on September 1, 1947. The book has since become a classic, but unfortunately its themes of alcoholism and failure were all too genuine a part of Lowry's life. While he continued to write and to travel, the remainder of his life was plagued by the severe emotional problems brought about by his excessive drinking. Malcolm Lowry died on June 27, 1957 in the English village of Ripe, Sussex. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Some Editions
Awards and Honors
Distinctions
Notable Lists
Daniel S. Burt's Novel 100 (081 – 81)
Series
Belongs to Publisher Series
De Bezige Bij 70 ([6])
Harper Perennial Olive Editions (2014 Olive)
Rowohlt Jahrhundert (29)
El cercle de Viena (58)
Lanterne (L 80)
Literaire reuzenpocket (128)
Gyldendals Tranebøger (241)
Penguin Modern Classics (1752)
Gallimard, Folio (351)
Work Relationships
Is contained in
Has the adaptation
Has as a reference guide/companion
Has as a study
Has as a commentary on the text
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Under the Volcano
- Original title
- Under the Volcano
- Alternate titles*
- Sous le volcan
- Original publication date
- 1947
- People/Characters
- Geoffrey Firmin; Yvonne Firmin; Jacques Laruelle; Hugh Firmin; Dr. Vigil
- Important places
- Cuernavaca, Mexico (Quaunahuac); Mexico
- Important events
- Day of the Dead
- Related movies
- Under the Volcano (1984 | IMDb); Volcano: An Inquiry Into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry (1976 | tt0070889) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wma61_... (1976 | IMDb)
- Epigraph
- LE GUSTA ESTE JARDIN
QUE ES SUYO?
EVITE QUE SUS HIJOS LO DESTRUYAN!
(finale)
Wonders are many and none is more wonderful than man; the power that crosses the white sea, driven by the stormy south-wind making path under surges that threaten to engulf him; and Earth, the eldest of the gods, the immortal... (show all), unwearied, doth he wear, turning the soil with the offspring of horses, as the ploughs go to and from from year to year.
And the light-hearted race of birds, and the tribes of savage beasts, and the sea-brood of the deep, he snares in the meshes of his woven toils, he leads captive, man excellent i wit. And he masters by his arts the beast whose lair is in the wilds, who roams the hills; he tames the horse of shaggy mane he puts the yoke upon its neck he tames the tireless mountain bull.
And speech, and wind-swift thought, and all the moods that mould a state, hath he taught himself; and how to flee the arrows of the frost when it is hard lodging under the clear sky, and the arrows of the rushing rain; yes, he hath resources for all; without resource he meets nothing that must come; only against Death shall he call for aid in vain; but from baffling maladies he hath devised escapes.
SOPHOCLES--Antigone
Now I bless the condition of the dog and toad, yea, gladly would i have been in the condition of the dog or horse for I knew they had no soul to perish under the everlasting weight of Hell or Sin as mine was like to do. Nay a... (show all)nd though I saw this, felt this, and was broken to pieces with it, yet that which added to my sorrow was, that I could not find with all my soul that I did desire deliverance.
JOHN BUNYAN--Grace Abounding for the Chief of Sinners
Wer immer strebend sich bemuht, den konnen wir erlosen.
Whosoever unceasingly strives upward . . . him can we save.
GOETHE - Dedication
- To
MARGERIE, MY WIFE - First words
- Two mountain chains traverse the republic roughly from north to south, forming between them a number of valleys and plateaus.
Two mountain chains traverse the republic roughly from north to south, forming between them a number of valleys and plateaux. - Quotations
- "A little self-knowledge is a dangerous thing."
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine.
- Publisher's editor
- Erskine, Albert Russel, Jr.
- Blurbers
- Burgess, Anthony
- Original language
- English
- Canonical DDC/MDS
- 813.52
- Canonical LCC
- PR6023.O96
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
Classifications
Statistics
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- 5,018
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- 2,782
- Reviews
- 101
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- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 118
- UPCs
- 1
- ASINs
- 68