Shows up, unexpectedly, he first has trouble registering her presence then, as Thirst monstrous, insatiable, inescapable. Someone really ought to count just how many drinks Firmin “For him life is always just around the corner, in the form of another drink at a new bar.” Probably the drunkest drunk of literature, Firmin drinks toward a sobriety beyond inebriation as he spends the bulk of the book scheming of ways he could restore his lost connections. Yvonne is anxious, Firmin static and painfully introspective. It is the morning of the Day of the Dead, 1938, and the world, at great distance, is beginning to erupt into World War II.įirmin’s wife, Yvonne, left him a year previous, and this morning, she’s suddenly come back to try to salvage their relationship, but both nurse old wounds, so a complete restoration seems highly unlikely.

Our tragic hero is former-British Consul Geoffrey Firmin, who lingers hunch-shouldered in an empty cantina, having booze for breakfast as the annoyed employees set the place up for the day’s business. Two volcanos dominate the skyline, their static peaks ever threatening eruption. Under the Volcano takes place in Quauhnahuac, a little town not far from Mexico City. Far from the popular notion that Malcolm Lowry’s masterpiece is merely “about alcoholism,” Under the Volcano remains a dead-serious bereavement of the insurmountable space that can separate two people sitting side by side. Though it is resolutely a Modernist work, replete with countless esoteric references and ambiguous plot movements, the implications of the work continue to startle me with their relevance to the Digital Age. Under the Volcano is mesmerizing, brokenhearted, almost infinitely discursive, a mescal-sodden, naval-gazing dirge. Since then, I have found myself continually pulling the book off the shelf, returning again and again to its sad, pristinely lyrical pages, as the seasons change and the state of the world remains tumultuous as ever. Last year, fighting the anxiety and listlessness that seems to have become the norm of our overstimulated era, I read Under the Volcanofor the first time.

Under the volcano novel