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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Verbal eruption, 8 Sep 2009
I know it's incredibly pretentious, arrogant even, to give the lowest mark to a classic, the `prophetic book for a whole generation', a novel Burgess himself called a masterpiece - or so it says on the jacket. But be warned. Lowry himself conceded that Under The Volcano `gets off to a slow start' (I quote the introduction).
It isn't just a slow start: it never starts. The novel has Geoffrey Firmin, ex-English Consul in a secondary Mexican town, drink himself to perdition on the very day his divorced, sluttish but repentant and benevolent wife comes back to be reunited with him. That is it; there is nothing more. Of course, the best plots are psychological. But Under The Volcano doesn't delve into psychology; it is a manifest, a book about fate, about self-destruction as philosophical act. Thus its dialogues are stylistically indistinguishable from the rest. Its setting, Mexico on the day of the dead, 1938, gets pages of description but fails to relate to the plotline; this might as well happen anywhere. And it is all told a year after the fact, leaving no room for a protagonist's inner struggle. Indeed, my impression is that Under The Volcano's refusal to tell a story in the accepted sense was the very reason for its popularity.
This might still be fine if the writing weren't so confused. Page upon page follows, without a paragraph break, of disjointed text and run-on sentences, forcing the reader to go back again and again to follow the narrative. At times, the novel turns into a patchwork of overlapping monologues, mixing half-backed political and literary expatiation with background noise and the Consul's alcoholic cravings. Accretive writing, I think it has been called. Other authors can be purposely hard to follow: Faulkner, for example, or some Virginia Woolf; but there is a point to their chosen style, which is to mimic the inner voice, to plunge the reader straight into the characters' mental machinery, enabling these characters to tell their tale in a manner that feels raw and real. Lowry's writing achieves no such thing. It is mannered and wooden, an indulgence - the writer's, not the reader's. Art for art's sake. Perhaps, finally, Under The Volcano's textual agglutinations are meant to simulate inebriation. I know easier ways to remind myself what inebriation feels like. Oh well, I guess I am just not an intellectual after all!
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21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"I love hell. I can't wait to get back there.", 4 Jan 2006
Geoffrey Firmin, the former British consul to Mexico, is a prisoner of alcoholism. A victim of the shakes, he hears voices, talks to people who are not there, and hallucinates, though he is often able to hide the extent of his drinking. "True, he might lie down in the street, but he would never reel." On The Day of the Dead in 1938, his recently divorced wife Yvonne returns to Quauhnahuac, over which two smoking volcanoes loom, to try to persuade him to reconcile. Coincidentally, Geoffrey's half-brother Hugh, with whom Yvonne apparently had a brief affair, also arrives that day, and the three share quarters, each hoping to recapture the past. When they take the bus to Tomalin to a bull-riding event, they see a wounded peasant dying beside the road, the peasant's horse with the number 7 branded on its rump, a tricky pesado, and a group of vigilantes, all of whom play a role in the climax which follows. Rich with details, both of the external world of Quauhnahuac and the internal world of Geoffrey, the novel, first published in 1947, reflects Lowry's own experiences as an alcoholic. Geoffrey, a fully-rounded character, knows that he must stop drinking in order to function effectively, but he is unable to function at all without drinking. He both loves and despises Yvonne, wants to leave Mexico but wants to stay, and wants to find peace but creates chaos. As Lowry reconstructs this one day in Geoffrey's life, the Day of the Dead, the pervasive symbolism adds to the feeling of overpowering doom--the smoking volcanoes ready to erupt, the "hideous pariah dog" that follows Geoffrey and Yvonne to the house, a barranca (chasm) which exists beside the house and which contains a dead dog, an Indian carrying "the weight of the past," vultures in the forest, Yvonne's release of an eagle in a cage, and sudden storms. All add weight and intensity to this powerful story of dissolution. Despite the depressing subject matter and a frustrating main character who cannot or will not help himself during the novel's four hundred pages, the novel is breath-taking--elegant both in language and construction. Carefully plotted, filled with unique imagery, and enhanced by symbolism which brings it alive on new levels, it overwhelms the reader with its impact and approaches classical tragedy as the inevitable, doom-filled events play out. Though the novel includes peripheral political issues of the day--Mexico's instability and the philosophical conflicts between fascism and socialism--it is primarily a variation on the story of the Garden of Eden and the fall of man--full, rich, dense, and rewarding, despite its pervasive sadness. Mary Whipple
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I Advise My Best Friends Never to Read the Volcano, 30 Aug 2008
It is my belief that Malcolm Lowry wrote the last chapter of this novel first - Chapter 12 - and my advice (who am I to give advice? - Lowry himself suggested that this book required twenty readings, and I have read it but only eleven times) to a "new" reader is to begin by reading the novel at Chapter 12, the end. And another thing: Lowry read aloud, mostly to his long-suffering wife and his few friends, every single word of this novel, so guy or gal, try this and take turns - eventually, I hope, you will tune in to his voice, and I hope that it is the voice of the book that will carry you through. And yet another thing: why not read the Chapters in reverse order? Lowry does not care how you read it - he's dead! - and maybe he did not have much talent, but I feel that he has stuffed the Volcano with so much stuff, that the novel assumes some sort of organic life of its own, with internal organs and the means to travel from A to B, or from B to A, such that one might be inclined to take it for a walk on a leash. Will this novel still be being read 50 or 100 years from now, along with "Heart of Darkness", "Cannery Row" and "Catch-22"?? - who can tell? This book has so much life in it that it has become a kind of friend to me. It will be in my box when the flames come.
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