Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry

[k-j]

Read this on the plane last weekend - a really stunning novel which changes the rhythm of your thoughts. I had a layover in Mexico City, so for a while I was an Englishman, drinking in Mexico, reading about an Englishman drinking in Mexico. It's one of those books that teaches you how to read it, so by the time you finish you want to go back and read the first half again - a book you could read four or five times.

[David]

I read a very interesting article about Lowry just the other day, with the result that I'd like to read this book now, never having wanted to before.

[k-j]

Where was the article, David? Can I find it online?

I finished UtV, then a couple of novels later I'm reading the much-hyped The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño, and I open it up to find an epigram from... Under the Volcano.

Really enjoying the Bolaño novel - he's not a lyricist like Lowry but he evokes (a different) Mexico just as well - a long novel but a lot of fun.

[David]

It was in a recent New York Review of Books - the article was called "The Passionate Egoist", by Michael Wood.

You might find it online, but I suspect that full articles are only available to subscribers (which includes me, probably the only one on the Island!) However, I can email articles to three (I think) friends, so if you give me your email address I can send it to you, if you like. (And any others you like the look of.)

Cheers

David

[k-j]

Recently read Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, a posthumous collection of three novellas and four shorts, some of which were simple perfection. There is a Manx theme running through some of the pieces - one of the characters is a Manx emigre and the title is apparently from a Manx fishing hymn. But the place most evoked is basically where I live now - the then-undeveloped cove near Vancouver where Lowry lived in the fifties and did most of his writing. The last piece, The Forest Path to the Spring is miraculous, filled with what can only be described as love.

You've got to wonder what he could have created if he'd been able to get his shit together for any length of time. I read a funny anecdote (maybe in that article you sent me, David): Lowry, arriving at JFK, was asked by US customs what he had in his large trunk. "I don't know," he says, "let's have a look." They open the trunk to find that it contains one football boot and a copy of Moby Dick.

[David]

Now that's very interesting. I wasn't aware of that at all. And it's a quote from The Manx Fisherman's Evening Hymn, guaranteed to bring a tear to the eye of any drunk Manxman. And many a sober one.

Thanks for that, k-j.

Cheers

David

[k-j]

His stuff is so autobiographical that I get the sense it's best read in chronological order. Certainly you should read the ones published in his lifetime - Ultramarine and Under the Volcano - before the posthumous stuff. Ultramarine may not be great but is probably worth reading just as it informs the later stuff. I suppose a biography is the best place to start!

He also has a Collected Poems which I'll be checking out in the near future.

[bobvincent]

A wonderful, atmospheric swirl of a novel, getting into an alcoholic's addling brain which also makes you want to visit Mexico and forgive those bloody tacos.