Book Club: Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry (1947)

Friends, I'm bringing the drama this time. Under the Volcano is #11 on our 100 best novels list, and it sounds all kinds of crazy cool. The novel is about one dude's final day of life. He's an alcoholic, a bureaucrat, he's just moved back to Mexico, he's trying to win his wife back, and it's the DAY OF THE DEAD holiday. We're going to spend the last day of Geoffrey Firmin's life with him in a little Mexican town nestled in the shadow of a volcano called Quauhnahuac. Modern Library says, "in a world that is as menacing and meaningless as it is exhilarating."

I just got my copy and I can't wait to start it! I'd never heard of this writer or novel and I'm intrigued. (I'm still reading Grapes of Wrath for the November 8th event, forgot how good it was!)

In Mexico, the Day of the Dead is a holiday full of laughter and storytelling, when friends and family gather to remember their ancestors with joy and playfulness. It's usually November 1 and 2. Death is not an ending, but one stage in a constant cycle.

People build alters, and the spirits of loved ones are welcomed back to earth for a visit. Friends and family feast together. Another tradition is writing poems in the form of epitaphs. These verses are often irreverent and satirical, and always clever. The poems are called calaveras.

Malcolm Lowry was sometimes dark and troubled, an alcoholic. Occasionally violent. He had himself committed. His alcoholism would get him thrown out of places he loved. He tried to save his marriage by moving the Mexico on the Day of the Dead, just like his protagonist in Under the Volcano. He failed. Later in life, his home was destroyed by a fire.

The struggles we humans endure.

He wrote his own epitaph as a poem, a calavera for his own death, inevitably ruled by the coroner as "death by misadventure."

"Here lies Malcolm Lowry, late of the Bowery,
whose prose was flowery, and often glowery.
He lived nightly, and drank daily,
and died playing the ukulele,"

I love storytelling and fun, and Day of the Dead has both. Those are the things that connect us to each other, even after death.

But I like a good journey through the dark side of us too, and this novel wades in it. I hope you'll join me!

Happy Halloween!

Luella