611. Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid

Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid
Malcolm Lowry
1968
Around 276 pages

What an awkward title. It's even lampshaded in the novel as kind of annoying, but it made the final cut anyway. Malcolm Lowry is part of our pessimistic crew of alcoholic writers. I wasn't too excited about his most famous novel, Under the Volcano, so I didn't expect much out of this one.

This was unfinished before Lowry's death, and apparently assembled by his wife, who may or may not have killed him. You can always tell when a work is unfinished, but when I like the author enough, I'll read the incomplete works anyway. Much like Under the Volcano, this is an autobiographical work about a struggling writer who almost drinks himself to death in Mexico. Lowry gives himself a really cool name though, in Sigbjorn Wilderness.

I never really enjoy hallucinogenic novels, and he pretty much covered this material before in his previous novel. You can tell he was an insecure and troubled person, which is always relatable. But if you take your new wife on a vacation to the same place where your first marriage fell apart, you are kind of bringing it on yourself, no?

RATING: **---

Interesting Facts:

Lowry reputedly wrote his own epitaph: "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," but the epitaph does not appear on his gravestone.

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444. Under the Volcano

Under the Volcano
Malcolm Lowry
1947
Around 425 pages

During his life Malcolm Lowry tried to strangle his wife twice, and it appears he either killed himself or his wife killed him. Juicy. Well, I don't entirely blame her for snapping, if this novel is any indication of what their life was like together.

Geoffrey Fermin is an alcoholic British consul living in Quauhnahuac, Mexico. There are plenty of stories about white men living abroad with a drinking problem, treating their wives horribly. Here's another one. Oh and there's a bullfight, because of course there's one.

I don't know, this just felt like a repeat of D.H. Lawrence, and he did it better. Lowry sounds like a very troubled person. Great writing can obviously make any perspective accessible, but I didn't find this novel to be particularly impressive.

RATING: **---

Interesting Facts:

In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Under the Volcano as 11 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the century. Let's take it easy.

Charles Bukowski said when he read Lowry's novel, "I yawned myself to shit."

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