by Malcolm Lowry
(Original Review, 1981-03-15)“The Consul reached forward and absentmindedly managed a sip of whisky; the voice might have been either of his familiars or - Hullo, good morning. The instant the Consul saw the thing he knew it an hallucination and he sat, quite calmly now, waiting for the object shape...
IntroductionBibliography--Under The Volcano
I know I once said that I could listen to John Lee read the phone book. Although I'm not saying that listening to his narration of Under the Volcano is the same as listening to a recitation of a directory listing, I think I understood and enjoyed this book about the same amount. The story is the f...
If you want a rich, modernist epic that infuses cinematic forms and mythological references into a day in the life of an anti-hero but don't want to kill yourself with Ulysses, try Under the Volcano. You won't die. You'll just get headaches, in a good way.
I was initially quite disconcerted by the novel's style. Narration freely mixed with stream-of-consciousness, leaps in time, shifting points of view -- all this I quickly adjusted to, but what took me longer was the highly literary artifice of the language, the erudite vocabulary and diction, the om...
After the first 50 pages confused me to the point of almost shelving it, Under the Volcano's spiraling mix of numbing vice and intoxicating prose slowly sucked me in. It reminds me of Nabokov's Lolita. They have the same unbearable depravity; appalling for the degeneracy, appealing for the luxurious...
Miserable lives.
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