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Under the Volcano

By Malcolm Lowry
Under the Volcano Geoffrey Firmin a former British consul has come to Quauhnahuac Mexico Here the consul s debilitating malaise is drinking and activity that has overshadowed his life Under the Volcano is set durin

  • Title: Under the Volcano
  • Author: Malcolm Lowry
  • ISBN: 9780060955229
  • Page: 412
  • Format: Paperback

    • Geoffrey Firmin, a former British consul, has come to Quauhnahuac, Mexico Here the consul s debilitating malaise is drinking, and activity that has overshadowed his life Under the Volcano is set during the most fateful day of the consul s life the Day of the Dead, 1938 His wife, Yvonne, arrives in Quauhnahuac to rescue him and their failing marriage, inspired by a visiGeoffrey Firmin, a former British consul, has come to Quauhnahuac, Mexico Here the consul s debilitating malaise is drinking, and activity that has overshadowed his life Under the Volcano is set during the most fateful day of the consul s life the Day of the Dead, 1938 His wife, Yvonne, arrives in Quauhnahuac to rescue him and their failing marriage, inspired by a vision of life together away from Mexico and the circumstances that have driven their relationship to the brink of collapse Yvonne s mission is to save the consul is further complicated by the presence of Hugh, the consul s half brother, and Jacques, a childhood friend The events of this one day unfold against a backdrop unforgettable for its evocation of a Mexico at once magical and diabolical.Under the Volcano remains one of the most powerful and lyrical statements on the human condition and one man s constant struggle against the elemental forces that threaten to destroy him.

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      412 Malcolm Lowry
    Under the Volcano

    About Author

    1. Malcolm Lowry says:
      Malcolm Lowry was a British novelist and poet whose masterpiece Under the Volcano is widely hailed as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century Born near Liverpool, England, Lowry grew up in a prominent, wealthy family and chafed under the expectations placed upon him by parents and boarding school He wrote passionately on the themes of exile and despair, and his own wanderlust and erratic lifestyle made him an icon to later generations of writers Lowry died in a rented cottage in the village of Ripe, Sussex, where he was living with wife Margerie after having returned to England in the summer of 1955, ill and impoverished The coroner s verdict was death by misadventure, and the causes of death given as inhalation of stomach contents, barbiturate poisoning, and excessive consumption of alcohol.It has been suggested that his death was a suicide Inconsistencies in the accounts given by his wife at various times about what happened at the night of his death have also given rise to suspicions of murder.Lowry is buried in the churchyard of St John the Baptist in Ripe Lowry reputedly wrote his own epitaph Here lies Malcolm Lowry, late of the Bowery, whose prose was flowery, and often glowery He lived nightly, and drank daily, and died playing the ukulele, but the epitaph does not appear on his gravestone

    Comment 188 on “Under the Volcano”

    1. Ben says:
      Purchase a large bottle of tequila and start walking from Ernest Hemingway s house to Vladimir Nabokov s house As you re walking, take a drink for the sake of squandered love Then take one for isolation Take one drink for war, and two for peace Take one for world weariness Take one for betrayal Take a big one for fear Take a bigger one for the allure of death Take one for a chasm opened between lovers Take one for connections that span oceans, continents Take one for filthy, homeless dogs And ta [...]
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    2. Glenn Russell says:
      Far above him a few white clouds were racing windily after a pale gibbous moon Drink all morning, they said to him, drink all day This is life Malcolm Lowry, Under the VolcanoDon t be fooled by the usual blurb on this novel telling you the story is about a British consul and his wife, his half brother and his childhood friend They are but bit players This is a novel where the main character is liquor and how liquor turns human blood and the nerves of the human nervous system into trillions of ti [...]
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    3. Helen Ροζουλί Εωσφόρος Vernus Portitor Arcanus Ταμετούρο Αμούν Arnum says:
      , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .
      Reply

    4. Ted says:
      The Consul, an inconceivable anguish of horripilating hangover thunderclapping about his skull, and accompanied by a protective screen of demons gnattering in his ears, became aware that in the horrid event of his being observed by his neighbors it could hardly be supposed he was just sauntering down his garden with some innocent horticultural object in view Nor even that he was sauntering The Consul was almost running He was also lurching In vain he tried to check himself The Consul Albert Finn [...]
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    5. Lyn says:
      A true literary masterpiece This is minimalistic in scope but brilliantly complex and multi layered in detail The exceptional prose is interspersed with flashes of stream of consciousness and eclectic, almost poetic imagery The multiple references to Conrad were interesting, almost the flip side of Heart of Darkness as Lowry describes the inevitable collapse of a man and in metaphor, civilization.
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    6. Agnieszka says:
      Labyrinth of streets, wild, lush tropical vegetation impudently encroaching everywhere, seizing the garden and the residence of Consul volcanoes majestically tower over the city hiding every moment in the clouds, humidity and heat suffocating everything around Atmosphere of unspecified horror lurking in the alleys, misery hanging in the air like a premonition of impending storm Mexico, fiesta Day of the Death, 1938 And though we know the time and place of action, in dialogues and flashbacks with [...]
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    7. Tara says:
      Under the Volcano tells the indelibly haunting tale of Geoffrey Firmin, a former British consul living in Mexico in 1938, assiduously drowning himself in alcohol Like much of the desolate landscape, he is at times so reconciled to his own ruin no sadness touches him Make no mistake, this is a landscape crackling with danger and despondency vivid, intractable, monstrous, divine You find yourself gradually submerged in it You re flattened by the oppressive heat, wearied and worn down by too much d [...]
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    8. Chris says:
      This seemed so promising self destruction love triangles Mexico , but after about 150 pages I couldn t hack it Certainly the most committed stream of consciousness study of alcoholism I ve ever failed at reading, but in the end I just decided to not become an alcoholic and stopped reading.
      Reply

    9. Nick Craske says:
      Under The Volcano I thought The Tunnel was the most exquisitely drawn book title But no Under The Volcano A fiercely poetic title Terse in form and rich in mythic imagery.Under Beneath and covered by Below the surface of At a point or position lower or further down than In the position or state of bearing, supporting, sustaining, enduring, etc.This is an incredible book I m experiencing an incredible run of great reads and discovering writers who I want to read of but Malcom Lowry s book stands [...]
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    10. Aubrey says:
      Lowry could not perform the vital surgery of separating himself from his characters He suspected at times that he was not a writer so much as being written, and with panic he realized that self identity was as elusive as ever Conrad KnickerbockerYou could state this novel was amazing You could name it false You could call this novel a giant of Modernism You could pass it off as the rambling obscurities of a overeducated white guy with too much money in pocket and too lengthy a time on his hands, [...]
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    11. Paul says:
      This is an influential book Bolano opens The Savage Detectives with an epigraph from it Under the Volcano isn t just a book about a drunk and a record of his drunken ramblings Our protagonist, the British Consul, Geoffrey Firmin is not a classic hero in the Hemingway mould craggy and square jawed Nor is he drowning his sorrows His primary relationship is not with Yvonne, his estranged wife, but with alcohol.There are oceans of allusions and references here the book is packed with them The Faust [...]
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    12. Fabian says:
      A good word to describe 1947 s Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry is languid This is authentic rambling genuinely one continuous drivel All of it sound and fury signifying nothing It s a true pity that the book is so inaccessible, unreadable it invites for some spontaneous skimming to occur, something a book must never inspire in its reader The setting is magnificent, but certainly not unalike Henry Miller with his snooze inducing masterpiece impostor Tropic of Cancer, the uglification of Mexico [...]
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    13. Michael says:
      I can see why many people love this book as a masterpiece Now several weeks since I completed it, I still experience some potent emotional resonance over its hollow dance of life and its frustrating ambiguities on the locus of evil and purpose I still expect to look up from the plane of my existence and see the twin volcanoes of its Oaxaca setting, glorious one moment, lonely or threatening the next That is a good sign that the book has gotten under my skin and shaken me up But my personal ratin [...]
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    14. Jessaka says:
      Este libro era muy dificil I heard about this book when my friend Julie and I were in Oaxaca, Mexico back in the mid 80s We had met a young man named Michael while there, and he showed us around Oaxaca and even took us to meet a Zapotec family in nearby Lacalulu It was All Soul s Day, and the women in the family were making tamales Julie and I tried to stir the dough that was in a large caldron She made it once around, and I could hardly move the spoon though the thick tamale dough The women lau [...]
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    15. Szplug says:
      Everything that takes place in Under the Volcano exists beneath the rarefied gaze of Popocatepetl, the towering volcano that dominates the south central Mexican plateau It is fitting that Lowry chose to make the volcano the omnipresent entity in his watercolor novel, since alcoholism, slumbering through filmy days and slurred nights, can erupt at any time into a furious outpouring of violent emotions, freed from the ruined tatters that constitute the remains of self control Such molten rivers ar [...]
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    16. Mala says:
      A hell of a book, i.e if you can take the hell In his seminal essay, A Temple of Texts Fifty Literary Pillars , William Gass has this to say Under the Volcano should have been an entry among this fifty Imagine it as the roof It took me three starts to get into it my resistance to it is now inexplicable, though I suspect I knew what I was in for I have never read a book personally harrowing It is also a rare thing in modern literature a real tragedy, with a no account protagonist to boot The Con [...]
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    17. Liam Howley says:
      Having never read David Foster Wallace, it is probably unfair of me to begin a review of Malcolm Lowry s Under The Volcano with a comment on his work, however, I once had the pleasure of a conversation with a girl, a customer in an establishment I used to work, who upon discussing the various authors she enjoyed groaned at the name of David Foster Wallace Other than a yet incomplete reading of Everything and More, it s about maths , I had no insight, so her groan only prompted a question Was Dav [...]
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    18. Oziel Bispo says:
      Gente, acabei a leitura desta obra agora pouco Nunca pensei que fosse me deparar com uma leitura t o dif cil desgastante Este livro n o para leitores lights uma leitura que exige muita aten o e apego.Basicamente conta a hist ria de Um c nsul Ingl s que vive no M xico que se afunda no v cio da bebida e visitado por sua ex esposa que tenta salva lo desse caminho sem volta.O livro todo envolto no misticismo dessa cidade Mexicana com todas as suas tradi es e festas sob o olhar atento de dois vulc es [...]
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    19. Pantelis says:
      The novel that accommodates the two absolute opposites No se puede vivir sin amar, Hell is my natural habitat
      Reply

    20. Janet says:
      The magnificent novel was the product of ten years of work by Lowry It takes place on a single day, the Day of the Dead 1938, on the eve of war, in Cuernavaca, Mexico in the shadow of the volcanoes Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl where the British Consul is drinking himself to death His beloved wife has divorced him, but now returns to see if anything can be salvaged of their relationship, which is the hope of the book, and part of its tragedy.Lowry s own alcoholism was prodigious, but his novelis [...]
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    21. Evan says:
      Ah, Malcolm Lowry, you were a batshit crazy drunken nut of a novelist at the right time to be so the mid 20th century a time of Jackson Pollock and atonal music and cut up literary narrative and horrible black box skyscrapers a time of an artistic aesthetic that, thank God, is dead and your obsessively overdescriptive novel in which even the non drunk characters spout non sequiturs showed your critically fashionable Joycean penchant for the stream of conscious and ample obscurantist references t [...]
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    22. Kimley says:
      It s been a while since I found myself so completely frustrated by a book s ability to be simultaneously truly amazing and annoyingly awful There were so many things about this book that I really loved And one thing that especially ruined the entire experience for me and that is Lowry s writing style In the dictionary next to the phrase purple prose is a giant photo of Lowry, grinning sheepishly, fully aware of his penchant for ornate verbiage About half way through I took a glance at the About [...]
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    23. Abailart says:
      Under the VolcanoI read the Picador Classics edition 1967 with an introduction by Stephen Spender Unusually, I read the introduction first, then again after reading the novel, which I read in three sittings I like Spender, and relate to his reading of the book Despite its dual reputations of being difficult and about alcoholism, it is neither As for difficulty, it s true that understanding Spanish would be helpful, but the saturated extratextual references to mythology, mysticism, history and so [...]
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    24. Ian "Marvin" Graye says:
      Place HolderI read this in about 1974.It is one of my favourite books ever, though I haven t read it again, yet.I remember its crystalline clear prose, even though it describes the life of an alcoholic.Perhaps, he just drank to achieve clarity.My Alcoholic TheoryLowry is probably evidence against my theory that alcohol kills the unhealthy brain cells first, therefore it purifies your brain.If this was ever true of Lowry, I think the alcohol didn t stop at purity, it started on all the other cell [...]
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    25. Josh says:
      I appreciate all the 5 star reviews for this book, but why did I give it 3 stars instead Each character had their downfalls Each had dreams shattered by one circumstance or another, hence this book read like one I would enjoy to the fullest, yet I can honestly say I only enjoyed parts The internal monologue of Firmin the Consul alongside his hallucinations and voices in his head were not for me I read slowly to interpret and soak it in, yet it didn t stick as much as I would expect I appreciate [...]
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    26. Jonfaith says:
      Towards the nightmarish conclusion of Under the Volcano, Yvonne recognizes that the drinks lay like swine on her soul That poetic glimpse into Bacchic darkness is a glimpse of the novel s mastery, It is impossible to distinguish it only as a novel about alcoholism, or, even, a return to the primoridal Eden besieged by History s jackboots Under the Volcano is so much than that Each of the principal characters exposes their soul, yet motivations remain dim, much like the fetid cantinas and the du [...]
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    27. Adam says:
      Malcolm Lowry s Under the Volcano is a mad prophet s dream of rising dangers, a masterpiece of symbolism the animal imagery, Dia de los Muertos, the Volcanoes , a great intertwining of voices radio, letters, movie posters, remembrances , an encapsulation of the era s political thought and literature, a surreal, hypnotic journey into the night, and a breathtakingly beautiful book a sad, half demented augury The last 50 or so pages are especially worth it One the most chilling last lines I have ev [...]
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    28. David Lentz says:
      Lowry s narrative technique is bold here we have the tale of one half of the last day in the life of a man who is drunk He is a British Consul living in Mexico beneath a volcano The narrative captures the vision of the drunk experiencing his life, which has become a Kubla Kahn This can t be easy to render yet Lowry ambitiously does so in a true 20th century masterpiece The protagonist literally stumbles through his incoherent existence like Leopold Bloom in the red light district of Dublin in Ja [...]
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    29. Jorge says:
      Obra aclamada por un gran sector de lectores como una de las mejores novelas del siglo XX Con todo respeto, a m no me ha causado una impresi n tan positiva, aunque s reconozco el esfuerzo derrochado para crear algo muy original Es una narraci n con cargados tintes autobiogr ficos, concebida bajo la fren tica inspiraci n de ingentes dosis de alcohol e invadida de una vehemencia extrema que a veces desconcierta y llega a agobiar Por otra parte esta singularidad literaria la considero un m rito del [...]
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    30. Jeff Jackson says:
      Confession It took me three tries to get past the first chapter or so You almost have to take it on the faith that things will become clearer and compelling they will and that the initial chapter is there for a good reason it is though that will only become evident as you finish the novel So don t be deterred by the initial steep path, the views from this Volcano are almost unmatched in 20th Century fiction It ll reward your patience and careful reading several times over Plus it has maybe the [...]
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