Word: volcano
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...began Under the Volcano as the train left the quiet, modern city of San Luis Potosi, read through the night, and finished it just outside of Nuevo Laredo. Even from the first deliberately subdued chapters, I found the novel completely engrossing. By the mid-point I was entirely under Lowry's spell. The distractions of each station-stop became intertwined with the awesome experience of discovering Malcolm Lowry. A small pig urinated on my duffle bag, right there in the car. Lowry's Consul awoke from a drunken stupor, trying to focus on the scorpion in front of him, stringing...
Perhaps Lowry's most forceful triumph in Under the Volcano, however, is his evocation of a totally isolated personality in the midst of people whose efforts to reach him seem quietly irrelevant. In the scene which switched me from an admirer to a believer, Lowry places the Consul between his wife and his half-brother on a crowded bus to Tomalin, the scene of the Consul's death. He then moves the wife and half-brother between a last hope of involving the Consul in conversation, of rescuing him from his suicidal self-absorption, and the recognition that...
Lowry wrote Under the Volcano over a ten year period, revising it repeatedly between 1938 and 1947, when it was finally accepted for publication. Before that, his only published work had been Ultramarine, an account of the year he spent at sea when...
...marriage, Lowry traveled to New York, began drinking heavily, and committed himself to a mental hospital, the scene of his novella, Lunar Caustic. The next year, he journeyed to Mexico hopeful of rejoining his wife, but instead plunged into the Maleboge of drinking and respair that "inspired" Under the Volcano. After languishing in Southern Mexico for two years Lowry left for the United States where he met Margerie Bonner, his second wife. In their squatter's shack on Vancouver Island, she nursed him through another seventeen years of alcoholism, depression and relentless bad luck, until his death from drinking...
...editors have tried to piece together bits of the large bulk of unfinished work, in remotely intelligible form. The results, painfully slow in coming, have been enough to nourish the cultists, but insufficient to excite the doubters. At any event, nothing has come out to suggest that Under the Volcano would ever have been displaced as Lowry's major work...