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Lowry va començar a escriure l'obra quan tenia 26 anys i va trigar deu anys a finalitzar-la. És considerada com la seva obra mestra i com una de les majors obres de la literatura de tots els temps.L'any 1999 l'editorial Modern Library va incloure a la novel·la en el lloc onzè de la seva llista de les 100 millors novel·les en parla anglesa del segle XX.
L'acció de la novel·la transcorre l'any 1938, al Dia de Morts i narra el que esdevé a Geoffrey Firmin, un ex-cònsol britànic alcoholitzat, a la ciutat mexicana de Cuernavaca. Aquest dia l'acompanyen la seva exdona Yvonne i el seu germanastre Hugh.
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Geoffrey Firmin, a former British consul, has come to Quauhnahuac, Mexico. His debilitating malaise is drinking, an activity that has overshadowed his life. On the most fateful day of the consul's life-- the Day of the Dead, 1938-- his wife, Yvonne, arrives in Quauhnahuac, inspired by a vision of life together away from Mexico and the circumstances that have driven their relationship to the brink of collapse. She is determined to rescue Firmin and their failing marriage, but her mission is further complicated by the presence of Hugh, the consul's half brother, and Jacques, a childhood friend. The events of this one significant day unfold against an unforgettable backdrop of a Mexico at once magical and diabolical. "Under the Volcano" remains one of literature's most powerful and lyrical statements on the human condition, and a brilliant portrayal of one man's constant struggle against the elemental forces that threaten to destroy him.… (more)
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If you do this right, you will end up passed out in a ditch somewhere between Hemingway and Nabokov, and you will have a fair idea of what 'Under the Volcano' is like.
Under the Mountain is a richly textured novel. Mexico is made both beautiful and terrifying in the way the author slips from the streaming consciousness of one character to another. Each character is a little lost and each is trying desperately to hang on to some home they are sure they've lost. They keep telling themselves, if only, if only, if only. Yet, the fact that they cannot speak so openly with each other, and if they do speak, it becomes lost in the chaos of the day and forgotten, means that their chance for hope is fleeting.
Yvonne is both straightforward and subtle, trying to open up forgiveness to Geoffry, trying to make him see that she loves him, that she will not abandon him again, that she will not become a shrew intent on restraining him. Meanwhile Geoffry, who has hoped so long for her return, seems trapped in a spiral of despair. It's like he's stuck on a carousel, and he can see her waiting, but it just keeps going around and around and he is too terrified to simply jump off.
The writing in this book is deeply beautiful and it carried me through to the end, though I must admit that in terms of pure story standpoint, I was deeply disappointed by the ending, having been brought around to love all of these characters so much, I had hoped for more.
But that never lasts more than oh a dozen magnificent, munificent pages at a time, and then it weebles and you're back amongst the upper middle class English twits being impressive (but only with the collusion of the author) in the colonies (what's that? Mexico was never a British colony? Don't be a pedant, darling), whether it's showing their more developed moral selves when they find a dead native in the road and the other natives are busy stealing his wallet, or whether it's jumping into the middle of a bullfight to show the vain, cowardly natives how it's done, casually flashing the Anglo-Saxon steel that one is sure oh so sure still lies on the level of tribal memory beneath one's degraded modern exterior. Or it wobbles and suddenly nobody's keeping it heavily light anymore, nobody's even keeping it together anymore, the banter's gone out and everyone's all lachrymose and oh lord save me from alcoholic British melodrama.
So anyway, you can see why they drink.
Under the Volcano is a tightly-focused narrative that, after being framed as a flashback from a year later by a friend of the main character, covers less than 24 hours in the lives of its principals. Incredibly, it manages to imply and evoke their lives leading up to this day, and the state of the world during their lifetimes, leaving you feeling as if you've read their complete histories before their day is up. The central character, and the fulcrum for everything that happens, is Geoffrey Firmin, often referred to as 'The Consul.' He is in fact the former British Consul to a central-Mexican town near the volcanoes Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl, but now an ex-pat who refuses to go home as World War II is busy getting underway. The novel follows the Consul's alcoholic sprint towards his doom, and watching him come to pieces, and the shrapnel damage it causes to those closest to him, is terrifying. The final hundred pages feel like an out-of-control downhill run through a lava field – and in spite of being able to see the brick wall waiting at the end of the run, there's nothing you can do to slow down and prepare. Because of the framing at the book's opening, you can see the brick wall all the way, but you are shocked nonetheless when you run into it.
It's hard to find redemption in addiction and alcoholism, and none at all is provided by Lowry – regardless, it now has a place on my 'all-time' list of novels.
—Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
Alternately frustrating and beautiful. Discursive and illuminating. Drunk and sober. Efflorescent and dissolving. Ascetic and dissipated. This book can only be described by how I understand it in
Sometimes. I mean, he is living between a pair of goddamn volcanoes, after all.
The book chronicles Geoffrey Firmin’s last drunken day of life. The plot is simple, but the writing is baroque and full of allusions to everything from Mesoamerican mythology to the Kabbalah, from the Spanish Civil War to contemporary Mexican politics. Basically, Firmin’s ex-wife visits him in Mexico, where he just lost or is about to lose his post as British consul due to the political situation there. He’s ambivalent about her because she was unfaithful to him, and his way of dealing with it is by being stinking drunk all the time.
The story is told from the point of view of a few characters: Firmin, his ex-wife, his brother (who is in love with Firmin’s wife) and a French film director (who had a brief affair with Firmin’s wife). The chapters from Firmin’s point of view are the most effective, though because they depict his drunkenness, they are also the most difficult to parse.
Firmin’s inner monologues include frenzied arguments with himself (mostly about whether he should have another drink) and labored attempts at piecing together what has been happening around him. The chapters in which he finds himself drinking at various establishments are particularly convincing, as in his inebriation time seems to slow down or speed up – a feeling that anyone who has ever overdone it can remember.
Even knowing the inevitable end, the tension is unbearable when a shit-faced Firmin finds himself at the last bar, drinking even more as he’s questioned by rogue policemen. And if you still think that knowing Firmin’s fate is disappointing, take heart: the penultimate chapter holds another big surprise that no one seems to write about.
One thing that won’t surprise is finding out that Malcolm Lowry was a life-long alcoholic. He died from what a tactful coroner referred to as “death by misadventure.”
If you enjoy Joycean logorrhea you’ll probably enjoy this. If you don’t, you might try the 1984 John Huston movie adaptation; I found it unbearably boring, but it won two Oscars, so what the hell do I know.
Hopelessly morose and alienated, Geoffrey, who experienced a heightened sense of consciousness and the imminence of fatality, had forfeited his trust in Yvonne for she had been with Hugh under the cover of saving him. It is amazing how uneventfully all the events constitute to the entire novel. Under the Volcano is such a powerful, lyrical statement of a chronic drunkard filled with rigid but somewhat fragmented prose. It captures the human conditions and one man's persistent struggle against the elemental forces that threaten to destroy him. The prose pervades a man's battle for the survival of human consciousness. At the same time imbedded in the narrative affords hints of his imminent fatality.
Under the Volcano is riddled with an air of lethargy and slowness. A ubiquitous theme is the consul's persistent temptation of getting his next drink. He frequently relapsed into a stream-of-conscious, hallucinatory conversation with a gabbled voice in his head, which pejoratively objurgated his lack of self-control. The volcano, despite its geographical location, might be thought as some abyss into which the consul descended for the harrowing. Other than the rigid prose and symbols that exemplify the main character, Under the Volcano is not a pleasurable read to say the least and it can be exhausting to one's patience. I say you will not be at a loss to pass this one.
This is one of the best novels I have read in a long time, but it is not one that everyone would enjoy.
The very first chapter sets the stage for the following eleven chapters. It is November 2nd 1940 in Quauhnahuac, Mexico and two men are reminiscing about the British Consul, Geoffrey Firmin. Chapter two takes us back exactly one year and we follow Firmin's activities for one short day. Be prepared for a pathetic man's sad Day in the Life. His ex-wife has just returned to Mexico from an extended stay in America in an effort to reconcile with Firmin but ends up having a better time with his half brother. All the while the Consul is drinking, drinking, drinking. It is tragic how he argues with himself about that one last drink. There are mysterious dogs, runaway horses, bullfighting, and of course, the ever present volcanoes. Warning, but not a real spoiler alert: this doesn't end well for anyone.
This was not a pleasant read, nor was it intended to be. Lowry’s depiction of the inner life of a long-term alcoholic is very impressive, and it is worth reading.
I’m only giving this three and a half stars, though, because I thought Lowry overdid things in other aspects of the book. The many ways in which he tried to throw in Kabbalistic elements, or Biblical references (and Goethe, and various philosophers, etc.), I felt, were a stretch: they did not work for me. Then there was the insistence on grandeur and universality that the book wants to lend its story. I thought was overdone, too: Under the Volcano is the story of a wealthy Western drunk in Mexico: there really is no need to pretend this is particularly poignant among the poverty, the oppression and the corruption regularly at display in 1930s Mexico. I think what I disliked most about this book is that Lowry seemed to be aware that he was writing a masterpiece and tried to make it An Important Book -- hence the literary references and the grandeur.
I really liked John Lee's narration but found this book was very difficult for me to process in audio form. The text is often stream-of-conscience style and jumps about & rambles. Plus there's a fair amount of Spanish since it is set in Mexico.
I can see why this is
"Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'intrate". This is the book that made me read Dante's Inferno in the original 13th century Italian.
Unfortunately only about a third of the book or less is written from the Consul's point of view, the rest being written from the perspective of the Consul's wife, Yvonne, his brother, Hugh, and his former friend, Jacques. None of these characters allow Lowry to use the stream of consciousness style to its best effect, and additionally a couple of these characters seem out of place in the narrative as a whole. Jacques seems an especially large misstep: he only provides the perspective for the book's first chapter, which is an especially curious choice because he is more divorced from the action than any of the other characters and therefore can give only a semi-cogent introduction to the major characters and circumstances of the book. After the first chapter I expected Jacques to be a major, if not the main, character of the book, and I kept expecting the book to jump back to him, only to eventually realize that he is by far the least significant of the major characters. Hugh is also a character that only sometimes feels connected to the main story, since many pages of the chapters written from his perspective are dedicated to explaining Hugh's backstory, a backstory which is largely unrelated to the main action of the novel. He's an interesting character, but not one that felt essential to this book. Yvonne fairs better than the other two by a significant margin, in fact there's an argument to be made that she's the real main character of this novel. She's the one with the drive and the goal, and although the ending makes clear that this is the Consul's story, Yvonne has far more agency than her husband. Passages dealing with Yvonne's interaction with her alcoholic husband are also well done, and she always feels integral to the story.
Besides passages describing the Consul and his addiction to alcohol the highlights of this book were Lowry's descriptions of Mexico, which are vivid and beautiful. He also writes poignant individual images and scenes as well, in particular I'm sure that a scene of a one legged beggar giving a coin to a beggar with no legs will stick in my brain for many days to come. Overall, however, scenes describing Mexico and Mexican life comprise only a small portion of the book, and most of the rest of Lowry's writing is good but not spectacular. What really drags this book down for me is the fact that much of the action and a couple of the characters feel largely superfluous. If Lowry had written a tighter book focusing on the Consul and his wife in Mexico, it could have been great, but as it stands I only found this work to be pretty good. 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4 for goodreads rating purposes.