Under the Volcano
Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780060153670 (0060153679)
Publish date: 1984
Publisher: Harper & Row
Pages no: 375
Edition language: English
(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...