Critical Assessment

“Today is All Souls’ Day, the culmination of Mexico’s Day of the Dead and the date on which, in 1938, the events of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano take place. I came to the book knowing only its reputation as a masterpiece of English modernism. I left thinking it one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. Everyone should read it at least twice – Lowry thought several readings were necessary for its full meaning to “explode in the mind” – and 2 November should see Cuernavaca (to which Lowry restores its Nahuatl name of Quauhnahuac) overrun with men and women posing as disgraced members of the diplomatic corps, a Latin Bloomsday for mescal freaks. Well, perhaps not that. Better that more people just read the thing.”

Chris Power, “Under the Volcano: a modernist masterpiece,” The Guardian. November 2, 2011

First Excerpt

“Yes, it struck her now that this whole business of the bull was like a life; the important birth, the fair chance, the tentative, then assured, then half-dispairing circulations of the ring, an obstacle negotiated – a feat improperly recognized – boredom, resignation, collapse: then another, more convulsive birth, a new start; the circumspect endeavours to obtain one’s bearings in a world now frankly hostile, the apparent but deceptive encouragement of one’s judges, half of whom were asleep, the swervings into the beginnings of disaster because of that same negligible obstacle one had surely taken before at a stride, the final enmeshment in the toils of enemies one was never quite certain weren’t friends more clumsy than actively ill-disposed, followed by disaster, capitulation, disintegration.”

 

Second Excerpt

“And the earth itself still turning on its axis and revolving around that sun, the sun revolving around the luminous wheel of this galaxy, the countless unmeasured jewelled wheels of countless unmeasured galaxies, turning, turning, majestically, into infinity, into eternity, through all of which all life ran on—all this, long after she herself was dead, men would still be reading in the night sky, and as the earth turned through those distant seasons, and they watched the constellations still rising, culminating, setting, to rise again—Aries, Taurus, Gemini, the Crab, Leo, Virgo, the Scales and the Scorpion, Capricorn the Sea-goat and Aquarius the Water Bearer, Pisces, and once more, triumphantly, Aries!—would they not, too, still be asking the hopeless eternal question: to what end? What force drives this sublime celestial machinery?”