in case you were worried about your drinking habits
apparently tuesday was the hundredth anniversary of malcolm lowry’s birth. reminded of the 2007 new yorker article by d.t. max about his (un)timely demise: day of the dead.
stephen metcalf of the new york times:
Coming of age a half-generation after “Ulysses,” the British-born, Cambridge-educated Lowry wanted to produce not just a novel but a cosmos-surfing, cosmos-swallowing book of books. “Under the Volcano” takes place in a demi-Joycean 12 hours, on the feast of the Day of the Dead in Mexico, and took Lowry a Joycean 10 years to fully emit. No one would ever call it underdone. Following the last hours in the life of a British dipsomaniac, “Under the Volcano” embraces everything from Dante to Freud to the cabala. Here it shambles like Cervantes, there it rages like Ahab, and every page of it pulsates on Out of Body Auto-Reply, that style of pure Lowry that points at once backward, to all European literature, and forward, to the mother of all nervous breakdowns.
also, there is a 1984 john huston film based on Under the Volcano, which i have not seen. it has recommended to me by someone whose judgment [in this department at least] i trust.
