Product Description

It is the Day of the Dead. The fiesta in full swing. In the shadow of Popocatepeti ragged children beg coins to buy skulls made of chocolate...and the ugly pariah dogs roam the streets. Geoffrey Firmin, HM ex-consul, is drowning himself in liquor and Mescal, while his ex-wife and half brother look on powerless to help him. As the day wears on, it becomes apparent that Geoffrey must die. It is his only escape from a world he cannot understand. UNDER THE VOLCANO is one of the century's great undisputed masterpieces.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #25631 in Books
• Published on: 2000-02-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review

I think I know a good deal about physical suffering. But this is worst of all, to feel your soul dying. I wonder if it is because tonight that my soul has really died that I feel at the moment something like peace...Sometimes I am possessed by a most powerful feeling, a despairing bewildered jealousy which, when deepened by drink, turns into a desire to destroy myself by my own imagination--not at least to be the prey of--ghosts--

Malcolm Lowry's Under The Volcano, first published in 1947, is quite simply one of the great novels of the 20th century. Semi-autobiographical, and taking place during the Mexican festival of the Day of the Dead in 1938, it recounts the last day in the life of the alcoholic ex-consul Geoffrey Firmin. Surrounded by the helpless presences of his ex-wife, his half-brother and acquaintances, he descends into a mescal-soaked purgatory, moving inexorably towards his tragic fate. His self-destructiveness reflects a spiritual struggle born of wilful abnegation and passivity, a depressed, existential acquiescence to the futility of positive action.

The story is simple, its manner of telling decidedly not: Lowry's style is dense, symbolic, allusive, the prose thick with resonance, and the structure complex, with flashbacks, abrupt shifts, and a gradual accumulation of information--it is a book that deserves reading and then rereading, for its pattern and subtleties reveal themselves only slowly. Firmin's story anchors the book's political ambience--the rise of Fascism and the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War lie heavily across its pages, and in turn make of Firmin not a character to be pitied but a representative figure of modernity. In this, Lowry's masterpiece has lost none of its power: it speaks to us of suffering and of loneliness, eliciting our compassion under the century's terrible shadow of mortality. --Burhan Tufail

Review
First published in 1947, Lowry's masterpiece has been compared to Jacobean tragedy, Melville's Moby Dick, Conrad's Nostromo, Joyce Cary and James Joyce. Now issued with a new introduction by poet and publisher Michael Schmidt, this highly original novel is set in and around Cuernavaca, a town in the mountains near Mexico City, on the Day of the Dead, 1938. It is told entirely in flashback, after an opening chapter set on the same day in 1939, a simple device which has given the novel an unnecessary reputation for difficulty. It is in fact often very funny, and at times deeply romantic, as Lowry charts the decline and tragic death of the British Consul, Geoffrey Firmin, an alcoholic of gargantuan proportions. His younger brother Hugh, recently returned from fighting in Spain, is visiting, as is Firmin's estranged wife, Hollywood starlet, Yvonne. On one level, there is a touching story of doomed love, with sinister undertones of espionage, while on another, Lowry's use of symbolism and poetically heightened prose make the Consul and his fate echo that of Europe, poised to tumble into the abyss of World War II. (Kirkus UK)

Here's another alcoholic nightmare told against a thoroughly knowledgeable background of Mexico, the people and the customs. Geoffrey Firmin's crowded life the world around slowly cracks through drink; not even his marriage to Yvonne, loyal but loved by his step-brother, Hugh, can save him. She leaves to get a divorce, while Geoffrey finds sympathetic cronies and old friends to accompany him from one binge to another. Yvonne's return, just as Hugh is leaving, brings about a new high in Geoffrey's drinking, and a new low in his hangovers. In futile altercation with the local police, Geoffrey is killed. Through the three central characters, there is the Joycean outpour of consciousness, a diarrhoeatic total recall, in the search for the cause of their rejection of life, in their rationalization of their self-portraits, in their knowledge of their griefs, despairs, bewilderment. Their casual, veiled conversations, wandering soul searchings, are highlighted against the Mexican setting, and the effect, sometimes with a brilliance, is a delirium of phantoms. For sophisticates. (Kirkus Reviews)

About the Author
Malcolm Lowry (1909 - 1957) was raised in England and died there but lived much of his troubled life semi-nomadically - in New York, Mexico and British Columbia.