Pursued by Furies
A Life of Malcolm Lowry
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- 18,99 €
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- 18,99 €
Publisher Description
Malcolm Lowry was the troubled author of
Under the Volcano (1947), a brilliant novel about the last day of an alcoholic former British consul on the Mexican Day of the Dead, the manuscript of which Lowry rescued from the flames when his fisherman's shack burned down in 1944. Lowry's other books were not always so lucky: his first novel,
Ultramarine (1930), was stolen after four years' composition and resurrected from a carbon copy; another manuscript,
In Ballast to the White Sea, was destroyed in the 1944 fire. An early draft of
In Ballast was discovered this century and published in 2014. Lowry's life, like his work, was often lost to chaos; Gordon Bowker's 1994 biography is a masterful account of a life spent adrift.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At age 15, English novelist Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957) composed hymns of hatred against his unloving mother and rebelled against his humorless, authoritarian father, a wealthy Liverpool cotton broker. At Cambridge, Lowry recklessly goaded suicidal fellow classmate Paul Fitte to kill himself, a fatal taunt that left Lowry with lifelong guilt. In this ruthlessly probing biography, British freelance journalist Bowker skillfully navigates the maze of Lowry's messy life marked by violent alcoholism, two unstable marriages and stints in jails and mental institutions as he drifted to and from London, Paris, New York and Mexico. Lowry's novel Under the Volcano (1947), a savagely honest portrait of his alcoholic suffering, is an existential exploration of alienation, exile and identity, but he never produced another masterpiece, claims Bowker, because his energies were diverted by accidents, illnesses, booze, private terrors and his second marriage, at once ``idyllic and Strindbergian,'' to former silent-movie actress Margerie Bonner. She told a selected few friends that Lowry committed suicide. Though the circumstances surrounding the writer's death remain a mystery, Bowker makes a startling observation: Lowry, who was obsessed with dates, died on Paul Fitte's birthday. Photos.
