Under the Volcano

by Malcolm Lowry

One would have thought the horrors of the present would have swallowed it up like a drop of water. It was not so. Though tragedy was in the process of becoming unreal and meaningless it seemed one was still permitted to remember the days when an individual life held some value and was not a mere misprint in a communiqué.

He had few emotions about the war, save that it was bad. One side or the other would win. And in either case life would be hard. Though if the Allies lost it would be harder. And in either case one’s own battle would go on.

Quauhnahuac was like the times in this respect, wherever you turned the abyss was waiting for you round the corner.

I think I know a good deal about physical suffering. But this is worst of all, to feel your soul dying. I wonder if it is because to-night my soul has really died that I feel at the moment something like peace.

“how, unless you drink as I do, can you hope to understand the beauty of an old woman from Tarasco who plays dominoes at seven o’clock in the morning?” It was true, it was almost uncanny, there was someone else in the room she hadn’t noticed until the Consul,

All your love is the cantinas now: the feeble survival of a love of life now turned to poison, which only is not wholly poison, and poison has become your daily food, when in the tavern—

Hugh put one foot up on the parapet and regarded his cigarette that seemed bent, like humanity, on consuming itself as quickly as possible.

There are so many super heavy lines in this book

“Then you don’t know whether you have divorced him or not?” “Oh, I’ve—divorced him,” she answered unhappily. “But you don’t know whether you’ve gone back to him or not?” “Yes. No … Yes. I’ve gone back to him all right all right.”

Good God, if our civilisation were to sober up for a couple of days it’d die of remorse on the third—”

If not Guzmán, if not, it could not be, but it was, it certainly was no less a figure than that of his companion the night before, Dr. Vigil; and what on earth would he be doing here?

Sentences like this make it hard to follow but sort of add to the drunken stupor theme of the book.

“I don’t want to speak to you at all really,” the Consul added after a moment. “For that matter I wouldn’t mind if this was the last time I ever saw you … Did you hear me?” “Have you gone mad?” M. Laruelle exclaimed at last. “Am I to understand that your wife has come back to you, something I have seen you praying and howling for under the table—really under the table … And that you treat her indifferently as this, and still continue only to care where the next drink’s coming from?”

Mexico was not laughing away her tragic history; Mexico was bored. The bull was bored. Everyone was bored, perhaps had been all the time. All that had happened was that Yvonne’s drink in the bus had taken effect and was now wearing off. As amid boredom the bull circled the arena and, boredom, he now finally sat down in a corner of it.