The Collected Works Volume One Book Reviews

The Collected Works Volume One by Malcolm Lowry Book Summary

A quartet of the British novelist’s finest works of fiction, including “Lowry’s masterpiece,” Under the Volcano (Los Angeles Times).
 
Malcolm Lowry was an author who poured his soul into his prose, including his struggle with his own demons. Of his most famous work, Under the Volcano, Dawn Powell wrote: “You love the author for the pain of his overwhelming understanding.” In the New YorkHerald Tribune, Mark Schorer commented that few novels “convey so feelingly the agony of alienation, the infernal suffering of disintegration.” D. T. Max wrote in the New Yorker: “[Lowry’s] portrait of an unravelling drunk was unnervingly intimate.” Honored by the Modern Library as one of the one hundred best English language novels of the twentieth century, Under the Volcano is widely acknowledged as “Lowry’s masterpiece” (Los Angeles Times).
 
In this novel and the other works of fiction gathered here, the reader follows Lowry as he confronts the abyss, but also shares in his eternal hope for transcendence.
 
Ultramarine: Lowry’s debut novel, and the only book, other than Under the Volcano, published in his lifetime, is the coming-of-age story of Dana Hilliot, who escapes the bourgeois provincialism of his upper-class British upbringing by joining a crew of weathered, world-weary sailors on a freighter bound for South Asia. Part Moby-Dick, part A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ultramarin  draws on Lowry’s own early experience on the sea.
 
Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place: Published posthumously, these seven stories and novellas include “Through the Panama,” in which a burned-out, alcoholic writer on a voyage from Vancouver to Europe tries to make sense of the literature that has kept him afloat, while the pulse of his life grows harder to distinguish, and “The Forest Path to Spring,” about a couple that has been through hell finding new life in the beauty and seclusion of a vast forest.
 
“[These] stories and novellas afford glimpses of the whole toward which Lowry was striving.” —The New York Times
 
Under the Volcano: Former British consul Geoffrey Firmin lives alone with his demons in the shadow of two active volcanoes in South Central Mexico. Drowning in alcoholism, Geoffrey makes one last effort to salvage his crumbling life when his estranged wife, Yvonne, arrives in town on the Day of the Dead, 1938.
 
“One of the towering novels of [the twentieth] century.” —The New York Times
 
October Ferry to Gabriola: Edited by Lowry’s widow and frequent collaborator, and released more than a decade after his untimely death, October Ferry to Gabriola is the story of a married couple striving for renewal, sanity, and transcendence in the deep seclusion of the British Columbian forest.
 
“What awaits [the reader] is worth the effort: a species of ecstatic, lyrical prose that has all but gone out of existence.” —The New York Times

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