Most Popular Books by Malcolm Lowry

Malcolm Lowry''s ''Under the Volcano'' is a profound exploration of the human condition set against the backdrop of 1930s Mexico. The novel intricately weaves together the experiences of Geoffrey Firmin, a British consul grappling with alcoholism and existential despair, as he navigates the volcanic landscape both literally and metaphorically. Lowry''s literary style is rich and poetic, employing a stream-of-consciousness technique that immerses readers in the protagonist''s fragmented psyche, while the narrative echoes themes of fate, love, and the search for meaning. The historical context of the Mexican Revolution looms large, serving as a poignant contrast to Firmin''s personal turmoil and highlighting the intersection of personal and political chaos. Malcolm Lowry, an enigmatic figure born in 1906 in Vancouver, was deeply influenced by his own struggles with addiction and mental health, which lend authenticity to the novel''s exploration of despair. His extensive travels and time spent in Mexico catalyzed his vivid depictions of the country and its cultural richness, informing the narrative''s depth. Lowry''s literary journey is also marked by a study of myth and religion, elements that permeate the text, reflecting his fascination with the symbolic dimensions of life. ''Under the Volcano'' is highly recommended for readers seeking a profound and challenging literary experience. Lowry''s intricate prose invites reflection, and his richly drawn characters foster an emotional connection that resonates long after the final pages. This novel is not just a tale of individual struggle; it is an iconic meditation on the complexities of existence and the human spirit.

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.

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.

A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS ORIGINAL Notorious for a misspent life full of binges, blackouts, and unimaginable bad luck, Malcolm Lowry managed, against every odd, to complete and publish two novels, one of them, Under the Volcano, an indisputable masterpiece. At the time of his death in 1957, Lowry also left behind a great deal of uncollected and unpublished writing: stories, novellas, drafts of novels and revisions of drafts of novels (Lowry was a tireless revisiter and reviser—and interrupter—of his work), long, impassioned, haunting, beautiful letters overflowing with wordplay and lament, fraught short poems that display a sozzled off-the-cuff inspiration all Lowry’s own. Over the years these writings have appeared in various volumes, all long out of print. Here, in The Voyage That Never Ends, the poet, translator, and critic Michael Hofmann has drawn on all this scattered and inaccessible material to assemble the first book that reflects the full range of Lowry’s extraordinary and singular achievement. The result is a revelation. In the letters—acknowledged to be among modern literature’s greatest—we encounter a character who was, as contemporaries attested, as spellbinding and lovable as he was self-destructive and infuriating. In the late fiction—the long story “Through the Panama,” sections of unfinished novels such as Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid, and the little-known La Mordida—we discover a writer who is blazing a path into the unknown and, as he goes, improvising a whole new kind of writing. Lowry had set out to produce a great novel, something to top Under the Volcano, a multivolume epic and intimate tale of purgatorial suffering and ultimate redemption (called, among other things, “The Voyage That Never Ends”). That book was never to be. What he produced instead was an unprecedented and prophetic blend of fact and fiction, confession and confusion, essay and free play, that looks forward to the work of writers as different as Norman Mailer and William Gass, but is like nothing else. Almost in spite of himself, Lowry succeeded in transforming his disastrous life into an exhilarating art of disaster. The Voyage That Never Ends is a new and indispensable entry into the world of one of the masters of modern literature.

Reprinted from Paris review, no. 29, 1963.

Lotgevallen van een schrijver, die in Mexico tracht af te rekenen met zijn verleden, dat hem tot alcoholist deed worden.

This is the first edition of In Ballast to the White Sea, the autobiographical novel by Malcolm Lowry, known to most only through the highly romanticized story of its loss in a fire. In fact, the typescript itself has probably been read by at most a dozen people since Lowry scholars learned that it was deposited at the New York Public Library.

The eighty letters, cards and other messages in this correspondence-- produced mainly by Lowry and Gerald Noxon but also by Margerie(Bonner) Lowry -- offer a fresh introduction to Lowry, a certain''Canadian'' Lowry. At the same time they give insight into twowriting careers (Bonner and Noxon) closely intertwined with his andvigorously championed by him in the 1940s. The letters observe the mind of Lowry at play on questions ofliterary technique, on films, and on the beauties and rigors of life inhis Dollarton shack on an inlet near Vancouver. They reveal a warm,supportive, enormously sensitive and intelligent man, modifyingsomewhat the image of him now available. With their dramatization ofNoxon''s role in Lowry''s writing career, they illuminate for thefirst time something of Lowry''s method of actually solving theproblems he encountered in re-writing Under the Volcano. Noxon, CBC radio dramatist, novelist, and poet, emerges as atalented and perceptive writer who was able to encourage Lowry bothmorally and practically. Noxon''s deftness in expertly combining theunofficial roles of devoted and spirited family member and literaryeditor gives the letters -- often brimming with high spirits and fondaffection -- a relaxed and buoyant tone missing from much other Lowrycorrespondence.

Swinging the Maelstrom is the story of a musician enduring existence in the Bellevue psychiatric hospital in New York. Written during his happiest and most fruitful years, this novella reveals the deep healing influence that the idyllic retreat at Dollarton had on Lowry. This long-overdue scholarly edition will allow scholars to engage in a genetic study of the text and reconstruct, step by step, the creative process that developed from a rather pessimistic and misanthropic vision of the world as a madhouse (The Last Address, 1936), via the apocalyptic metaphors of a world on the brink of Armageddon (The Last Address, 1939), to a world that, in spite of all its troubles, leaves room for self-irony and humanistic concern (Swinging the Maelstrom,1942–1944).

To a remarkable extent the filmscript of Tender is theNight, which Malcolm Lowry wrote in 1949-50 with the help ofMargerie Bonner Lowry, is less an adaptation of F. ScottFitzgerald''s novel than an extension of Lowry''s own fiction. AsMiguel Mota and Paul Tiessen show, Malcolm Lowry''s script containsimportant passages which are really "cinematic" restatementsof parts of Lowry''s novel Lunar Caustic, and of shortstories such as "Through the Panama" and "StrangeComfort Afforded by the Profession." The editors note also the many direct and indirect allusions toelements from Lowry''s master-work, Under the Volcano(1947), a novel that is regarded by many critics as one of the most"cinematic" prose works of the twentieth century. A closestudy of the text reveals that Lowry took on the Tender is the Nightproject partly as a means of reopening his Under the Volcanonarrative, of re-exploring its plot and problems and its characters andthemes, and of carrying as far as possible the "cinematic"style he had begun to examine in that work. Lowry''s Tender is the Night manuscript is important,then, not only as a completed, 455-page text in its own right but alsoas a text having a direct bearing on Lowry''s own reading ofUnder the Volcano and of his sense of artistic direction afterthat work. Indeed, the editors consider the significance of thefilmscript as a key - hitherto almost entirely overlooked - tounderstanding his projected multiple volume work, The Voyage ThatNever Ends. This scholarly edition of Lowry''s script presents 38 passages ofvarying length - from less than one page to over 100 pages - in whichLowry writes with a freedom and creativity that lead to a textnarratively and stylistically quite separate and distinct fromFitzgerald''s original. It excludes passages where Lowry adheresmore or less slavishly, at 37 intervals, to Fitzgeralds'' novel,though it provides brief narrative summaries of and comments on thoseomitted sections. Lowry''s achievement in his filmscript demonstrates the nature ofhis life-long commitment to and extensive knowledge of theinternational cinema from the 1910s to the 1950s and also the nature ofhis view of the novelist''s responsibility to participate in thedevelopment of film as an art. The script also illustrates Lowry''s relationship with F. ScottFitzgerald as one in a series of literary kinships, and as the editorspoint out, the work becomes a criticism and analysis of bothFitzgerald''s novel and of Fitzgerald himself.

DIVDIVParadise proves fleeting in this engrossing tale of a married couple who tries to chase away the past by immersing themselves in nature/divDIV Edited by Malcolm Lowry’s widow and released more than a decade after his death, October Ferry to Gabriola is the sentimental story of two individuals striving for sanity, inspiration, hope, and purpose in the deep seclusion of the British Columbian forest. Once the couple finds a new home in the woods, their new, off-the-grid life together becomes their last attempt at finding stability... Illuminating and joyful, October Ferry to Gabriola is a striking ode to the struggle for hope amid the purity of the wilderness—a story made all the more poignant by Lowry’s untimely death before publication./div/div

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.

From the beginning, John Sutherland recognized that his literary gifts lay in criticism rather than in poetry. His independence from the academy and his largely autodidactic training gave him a unique perspective as a critic of Canadian literature. What these letters document, beyond a purely personal struggle, is a period (1942-1956) of great importance in the development of Canadian poetry, and it is above all the nuts and bolts of that development that they bring into keen relief: the economics of publishing books and literary magazines in the days before The Canada Council, and the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of trying wholly to live a life in literature at that time.

Malcolm Lowry, author of Under the Volcano and one of the most celebrated English novelists of this century, was also a writer of superb letters. Collected here for the first time are close to 800 letters spanning more than thirty years, most of them never before published and all of them carefully annotated. Lowry''s letters range from his detailed, erudite, 35-page-long exegesis of his masterpiece to impassioned letters and notes to his wives. They include witty, ironic self-parodies, letters to younger writers, full of generous advice and literary discussion, and letters with analysis and acute insight into politics and current affairs. Lowry frequently illustrated his letters with drawings, marginal sketches and symbols of good cheer such as his seagulls which adorn many of the later letters. These illustrations have been reproduced in both volumes of The Collected Letters of Malcolm Lowry together with many photographs of Lowry and his correspondents, and reproductions of interesting holograph letters.

Este fiesta din ziua morților în micul oraș mexican Quauhnahuac. În umbra vulcanului, copii în zdrențe cerșesc bani ca să cumpere cranii de ciocolată, câini vagabonzi bântuie pe străzi, iar Geoffrey Firmin – fost consul, fost soț, un bărbat alcoolic și distrus – își trăiește ultima zi din viață. Hotărât să se înece în mescal sub privirile neputincioase ale fostei soții și ale fratelui său vitreg, consulul a devenit o figură tragică. Pe măsură ce ziua se scurge, devine evident că Geoffrey trebuie să moară. Este singura sa evadare dintr-o lume pe care nu o poate înțelege. Povestea lui, imaginea călătoriei agonizante a unui om spre Calvar, a devenit o carte profetică pentru o întreagă generație. Sub vulcan nu poate fi comparată decât cu marile cărți totemice ale secolului nostru: De veghe în lanul de secară a lui J.D. Salinger sau Pe drum a lui Jack Kerouac. The New York Times Sub vulcan dezvăluie acele două trăsături de geniu ale prozei lui Lowry – limbajul poetic și capacitatea de a conferi detaliilor autobiografice o valoare universală. Los Angeles Times