Word: wife
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Lowry matches Updike's portrayal of Rabbit Angstrom's wife drunkenly drowning her baby in his scene showing the besotted Consul desperately trying to place a telephone call. The beauty, the wordiness, the luxury and the humor of his prose find expression again and again in sentences such...
...novel recounts the last day in the life of Geoffrey Firmin, the British Consul in the Mexican town of Quauhnahuac (Cuernavaca). The Consul, a dipsomaniac, has hardly been sober since his wife left him a year before. On the Day of the Dead, 1938, she suddenly returns, but it becomes increasingly clear that there is no way that he can respond to her, no way that he can free himself even for a day from the lure of the quasi-hallucinogenic Mexican drink, mescal. Near the end of the day, the consul stumbles away from his wife into...
...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 he has already...
...after the breakup of his first 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...
Since his death, his wife and two other 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...