Extract

No se puede vivir sin amar. (One cannot live without loving.)

A ruined consul drinks mescal in a garden in Quauhnahuac on the Day of the Dead, 1938, while above him the twin volcanoes of Mexico rise into a sky at once literal and apocalyptic. Malcolm Lowry spent a decade rewriting this novel, pouring into it everything he knew about alcoholism, love, despair, and the approach of war. Geoffrey Firmin's twelve-hour descent is mapped with the density of Joyce and the spiritual anguish of Dante: every cantina a circle, every refusal of help a deeper damnation. The prose is lush, allusive, devastating, a baroque cathedral built over an abyss. Lowry gave literature one of its great doomed figures, a man who drinks not to forget but because he has remembered too much and forgiven too little.