Author: Malcolm Lowry Publisher: New Amer Library ISBN: 9780451132130 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 328
Book Description
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.
Author: Frederick Asals Publisher: University of Georgia Press ISBN: 9780820318264 Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 494
Book Description
Ten years in the making, Under the Volcano is the best-known work of writer Malcolm Lowry. Published first in 1947, it is a brilliant, moving, and complex novel, perhaps the last fictional masterpiece to emerge from the modernist movement. As the years went by, Lowry's obsessive rewriting took him further and further into his book, which changed relatively little in the outer semblance of action and main characters but became utterly transformed in texture from the thin and mediocre version of 1940 to the rich tapestry of 1947. The numerous manuscripts allow a look at the processes by which Lowry created not only his masterwork but also his own reputation as a modernist genius. This study offers an extended examination of individual drafts as the novel slowly developed and, in a final chapter, an appraisal of the implications of Lowry's revisions for the book as published, an appraisal that suggests bases for new readings of Under the Volcano.
Author: Malcolm Lowry Publisher: University of Georgia Press ISBN: 9780820317632 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 436
Book Description
Although Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957) published only two novels--Ultramarine and Under the Volcano--in his lifetime, numerous other works, most of which have since been edited for publication, were in various stages of composition at his death. La Mordida, the longest and most significant of the manuscripts that have not been previously published, is a draft of a novel based on Lowry's visit to Mexico in 1945-46, which ended in the arrest and deportation of Lowry and his wife following a nightmarish run-in with corrupt immigration authorities. On its most immediate level, the title La Mordida--which means "the little bite," Mexican slang for the small bribe that officials are apt to demand in order to expedite matters--refers to the autobiographical protagonist's legal difficulties. In a larger sense, however, it also represents his inability to escape his past, to repay the fine, or debt, that he owes. The central narrative of La Mordida involves a descent into the abyss of self, culminating in the protagonist's symbolic rebirth at the book's end. Lowry planned to use this basic narrative pattern as the springboard for innumerable questions about such concerns as art, identity, the nature of existence, political issues, and alcoholism. Above all, La Mordida was to have been a metafictional work about an author who sees no point in living events if he cannot write about them and who is not only unable to write but suspects that he is just a character in a novel. A reading of La Mordida in the context of Lowry's aesthetic theories and psychological problems shows why he dreaded the completion of his projects to such an extent that he called success a "horrible disaster" and compared death to "the accepted manuscript of one's life." The reason, La Mordida makes clear, lies partly in the aesthetic theories that led Lowry to attempt a book that he prophetically called "something never dreamed of before, a work of art so beyond conception it could not be written." Patrick A. McCarthy's edition of La Mordida is based on materials held in the Malcolm Lowry Archive at the University of British Columbia. Its publication provides essential evidence for a balanced assessment of Lowry's creative processes and his achievement as a writer.
Author: Gordon Bowker Publisher: Faber & Faber ISBN: 9780571252800 Category : Authors, English Languages : en Pages : 712
Book Description
Malcolm Lowry was the troubled author of Under the Volcano (1947), a brilliant novel about the last day of an alcoholic former British consul on the Mexican Day of the Dead, the manuscript of which Lowry rescued from the flames when his fisherman's shack burned down in 1944. Lowry's other books were not always so lucky: his first novel, Ultramarine (1930), was stolen after four years' composition and resurrected from a carbon copy; another manuscript, In Ballast to the White Sea, was destroyed in the 1944 fire. An early draft of In Ballast was discovered this century and published in 2014. Lowry's life, like his work, was often lost to chaos; Gordon Bowker's 1994 biography is a masterful account of a life spent adrift.
Author: Malcolm Lowry Publisher: Open Road Media ISBN: 1453286314 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 519
Book Description
Seven stories and novellas by the author of Under the Volcano, a master of twentieth-century fiction. For fans of the novel Under the Volcano, this collection of stories—many of them published for the first time posthumously—provides great insight into the author’s genius. The stories range from heartfelt tragedy to exuberant triumph. In the novella “Through the Panama,” a burned-out, alcoholic writer tries to make sense of the literature that has kept him afloat while the pulse of his life grows harder to distinguish. In “The Forest Path to Spring,” a couple that has survived hell finds new life in the seclusion of a vast forest. And in “The Bravest Boat,” a young boy sends a message across the ocean to an unknown recipient. Together, these stories reveal a writer who traveled widely, observed keenly, and maintained an engrossing literary style that still reverberates today.
Author: Malcolm Lowry Publisher: Penguin UK ISBN: 0141196114 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 78
Book Description
An autobiographical novella that tells the story of Bill Plantagenet, a piano player and ex-sailor who has lost his band and his mind drinking in New York.
Author: Malcolm Lowry Publisher: UBC Press ISBN: 9780774803625 Category : Canadian literature Languages : en Pages : 460
Book Description
Although his literary reputation rests primarily on his novels, Malcolm Lowry (1909-57) considered himself to be a poet, and he composed an extensive poetic canon. No reliable edition of Lowry's poetry currently exists. Increasing critical interest in all aspects of Lowry's life and work prompted the preparation of this complete edition of his poetry, in which the poems are located, identified, dated, arranged, collated, annotated, and explicated by biographical, critical, and textual introductions.
Author: Malcolm Lowry
Author: Frederick Asals
Author: Malcolm Lowry
Author: Douglas Day
Author: Gordon Bowker
Author: Malcolm Lowry
Author: Malcolm Lowry
Author: Malcolm Lowry
Author: David Markson
Author: Malcolm Lowry