“March violets” is a derogatory term for those Germans who, after Hitler’s ascension to power, suddenly became ardent supporters of National Socialism. This detective novel, the first in Kerr’s Berlin Noir trilogy, takes place in 1936 as the city prepares to host the Olympics by hiding the more egregious evidence of policies attacking Jews and others considered undesirable.

Ex-policeman Bernie Gunther has set up as a private investigator. In the best noir tradition, he works alone from a small office and regards the moral poverty of his clients and the government with cynical amusement. Many of his cases involve searching for missing persons, usually Jews, whose families are desperate for news of them. Bernie is not a Nazi but is careful of what he says and does, observing the necessary forms: the salutes, the chants of “Heil, Hitler”.

Hired by a wealthy industrialist whose daughter and son-in-law have been murdered, Bernie’s assignment is to recover a valuable diamond necklace that was stolen from a safe in the couple’s bedroom. His investigation leads him into cabarets, police interrogation rooms, the clutches of a couple of femmes fatale, and a seat at the Olympics to watch Jesse Owens compete. He finds a conspiracy that seems to involve low-level criminals, officials like Goering and Himmler, and possibly even his own client.

I’m grateful to my friend Steve for recommending this author. Admittedly, I was skeptical of how the historical context would play out and, as Steve warned, it is a little odd to have these monsters of history wandering in and out of the story. The description of the atmosphere of pre-war Berlin and the political nuances of the insidious spread of Nazism are among the best things in the book.

My only quibble comes towards the end. In one too many plot twists, Bernie is briefly sent to Dachau. As a privileged prisoner, he observes the suffering of others and, when he can, tries to alleviate it. The scenes in the concentration camp are passed over quickly—descriptive and moving, yes, but not given the attention such a significant situation demands.

The concept of emotional weight was brought home to me a few years ago. I’d written a number of short stories about single mothers, skipping quickly over the reason for the absent husband/father. Yet every critique group honed in on that brief dismissal as a flaw, wanting to know more about the divorce or death or desertion. I was dismayed because this backstory was not relevant to the story I wanted to tell. I began to suspect that the only stories we were allowed to tell about women were love stories.

However, I finally understood that it was the emotional weight of these events that was pulling my stories askew. Death and divorce are huge life changes and not something to be dismissed in a sentence. By mentioning them, I was inviting the reader to participate in them emotionally. As one workshop leader said, “Do not set up a door for the reader unless you are going to open it.”

In Kerr’s book, the emotional weight of the concentration camp distorts the rest of the story. As a reader, I could not be satisfied with a few brief scenes of camp life before being returned to the streets of Berlin and the “larger” puzzle. It felt wrong to me. Kerr might have done better not to go there at all. Still, March Violets is the first of the series, so much can be forgiven. The noir aspects work surprisingly well; the characters are strong; and the plot (other than my one quibble) excitingly torturous. I will certainly try some of his other books. 

My father used to say that when he died, we should just cram his body into a garbage bag and put it out with the trash. As a doctor, he knew about all the goopy things that our pretty skins hide. He was accustomed to the idea that after death our bodies retain nothing of the animating spirit that once looked out of our eyes, and believed that dead bodies should be discarded without sentimental references to the person they once held.

We don’t like to think about death. Hard as it is to believe in our own death, it is even harder to envision what is happening to our deceased loved ones’ bodies, the way they are putrefying and disintegrating in the ground, just like the burst-open deer by the roadside or the blackened potatoes in the bin. If you don’t believe in heaven and hell, or paradise, or reincarnation, then all you have is this life. This brief, unrehearsed life.

In this short novel Crace makes us look at death. Coolly and unsentimentally, he opens with the bodies of two middle-aged zoologists, murdered in the dunes of a remote beach, and describes the effects of sun and rain, beetles and flies. Braided into this dispassionate report are several other stories. One starts from the murder and retraces the couple’s steps backwards through the hours of that fatal day. Another tells the story of how Joseph and Celice first met, at that same beach, and how they first came together, cradled by those same dunes. Yet another story goes forward in time, as their estranged daughter is alerted that they are missing and begins to search for them.

I should have hated this. I am usually irritated by stories that jump around in time or person, much less both together. It is a tribute to Crace’s writing that these shifts never disturb the flow of his story; each seems like the most natural progression in the world. With each shift, he quickly locates us in the appropriate story, sometimes with a person’s name, sometimes by actually providing a heading with the date and time. In the description of the book on Crace’s website, it’s mentioned that these stories moving forwards and backwards in time mimic the movement of tides, which I think may contribute to their easy transitions. Also, and I don’t mean this in a bad way, the shifts came just as I was ready to move on. The descriptions of the bodies, while scientific, are beautiful in their own way; they are almost poetic, not just by the close attention to detail but by the quality of the language. Yet there’s only so long that I want to read about ants and maggots. Also, as quirky and interesting as the two zoologists and their daughter are, I found it hard to care about them. Moving between storylines kept me from getting impatient with the characters.

The writing is brilliant, as I’ve said. Even without caring about Joseph and Celice, I found their story powerful, especially what they found to love in each other and the adjustments they made to accommodate each other during their long marriage. At the moment of his death, Joseph reaches out and takes hold of Celice’s ankle. That tenuous and tender connection, which remains throughout the book, reminded me of something I saw in a private chapel at Lullingstone Castle in Kent: statues of a man and a woman, lying on their separate tombs, yet in the space between, their hands joined. Later, reading Philip Larkin’s poem “An Arundel Tomb”, I wondered if this was perhaps a more common funerary motif than I’d thought. Looking at Crace’s website, I see that John Banville, in his review of the book, also was reminded of Larkin’s poem. It’s absurd that such a small gesture should be so moving, yet I was moved.

I was reminded too of Kevin Brockmeier’s novel A Brief History of the Dead which I blogged about a few years ago. The story takes place in the land of the dead, a kind of purgatory, where people remain until the last person who knew them or remembered them dies, suggesting that our immortality consists of the memories we leave behind. Crace’s book does not offer the idea of purgatory or any kind of afterlife to take the sting out of death, but by recounting the story of Joseph and Celice’s life together, he gives their going a kind of grace.

When my father went, we did not put him out with the trash. We held a memorial service where my brother recounted family stories while wearing a cap emblazoned with “See Rock City”. Then we buried my father next to his parents. Such rituals may be a sham—and a waste of good compost—but they were a comfort to my mother. Then again, we grown children disrupted the interment with a snowball fight, so all was not lost.

I haven’t read much of Eliot’s poetry since my schooldays, though I did spend some time studying the “Four Quartets” a few years ago, curious as to why the poem as a whole did not stick in my mind the way “The Wasteland”, for example, did. In preparing to lead a discussion of Eliot’s poetry for our local poetry group, I did reread this collection, along with some critical essays on his work.

Although I’ve always appreciated Eliot’s poetry—the range of thought behind it, the attempt to address great themes, the individual lines that one can never forget—I can’t say that it has moved me deeply. An exception is this remembered section from “Little Gidding” that had sent me back to the “Four Quartets”:

And what the dead had no speech for, when living,

They can tell you, being dead: the communication

Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

Not to sound like a character out of the tv series Lost, but speaking with the dead, speaking for the dead, has been an obsession of mine for some years. Perhaps obsession is too strong a word, but certainly an obligation. What I found in rereading this collection was a short poem that affected me as though the dead were in truth speaking to me: “Rannoch, by Glencoe”. You can read it here:
http://www.poetryatlas.com/poetry/poem/1172/rannoch,-by-glencoe.html

I don’t recall having read it before, but coming as I do from a long line of MacDonalds, I am shocked that I might have skipped over or forgotten anything referring to Glencoe. The Massacre of Glencoe lives on in the minds of MacDonalds; one has only to read Alistair MacLeod’s excellent short stories and novel to see its effect played out in the present. On February 13, 1692, three troupes of Campbells, who had requested and been granted hospitality by members of Clan MacDonald, rose up in the night and murdered their hosts. 38 MacDonald men were killed; 40 women and children later died of exposure after their houses had been burned. Coming as it did after the defeat of James II at the Battle of the Boyne and the end of the rebellion, the massacre of the Royalist MacDonalds by the Parliamentarian Campbells was unnecessary and egregious, the crime exacerbated by the abuse of the unwritten law of hospitality.

A few years ago, I happened to meet a colleague in an Irish pub, and he introduced me to one of his clients whose name happened to be Campbell. I said that I was a MacDonald. In no time, we were refighting the battle, pulling out justifications for each side. The incident made me realise yet again how we carry the past with us. It also made me look with new eyes at today’s conflicts that are fueled by old wrongs.

Eliot’s poem is a marvel of compression. It captures that eerie sense of dislocation that one often feels revisiting an old battlefield, as one member of the discussion group said, recalling his own visits to Gettysburg and Antietam. Another member pointed out that though the beginning includes wildlife appropriate to a pastoral scene—crows, deer—they are “starving crows” and a stag that “Breeds for the rifle”, leaving us disturbed and uneasy. She also noted that the closeness of the sky overhead, “scarcely room/To leap or soar”, creates a sense of claustrophobia. The closeness of the past, the memory that seems to be bred in your bone: Eliot captures these perfectly. And his later description in “Little Gidding” of how these old foes now stand together makes me wonder again what we owe to the past, to the dead.

I like this series by Donna Leon. Set in Venice, they are police procedurals featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti. In this one, an American archeologist is savagely beaten. Brett Lynch splits her time between her flat in Venice where she lives with her partner Flavia Petrelli, a successful opera singer, and the site in Xian, China where the terra cotta warriors are being unearthed. Brunetti recognises her name in a police report, having met her some years previously, and undertakes the investigation. Murder ensues, and much suspense, heightened by the onset of the seasonal high waters that flood the piazzas and lower floors.

One of the things I like about these books is the way Leon presents the whole of Brunetti's life, not just his work on the case and interactions with his co-workers, but also chats with his wife, cooking dinner, sorting out his children's problems, meeting friends for drinks. She manages to insert these scenes in such a way that they maintain, and sometimes even increase the suspense.

The characters in Leon's books are always well-drawn, even the minor characters. I particularly enjoyed seeing more of Sergeant Vianello and learning more about Signorina Elettra's background. She is the amazingly competent and resourceful secretary to Brunetti's superior, Dottor Patta. I also admired the way Signor La Capra and his son Salvatore, who could so easily have been simple stereotypes, come to life in this story.

Coincidentally, I recently saw the exhibit of terra cotta warriors at the National Geographic Museum in Washington, D.C. with my friend Laura. The warriors themselves were much larger than I'd envisioned and more varied. One of the docents explained that a new site had been found recently by a farmer and was in the process of being excavated. The new site is at some distance from the original tomb, so now they have widened their search for additional sites. With this background, I was not surprised that Brett was still actively working the site in Xian and could picture the artifacts to which she refers.

Such synchronicity always enhances my reading; I love when a book turns out to be set in a place where I have been or refers to something familiar like the terra cotta warriors. When my friend Cynthia was last in Venice, she encountered the acqua alta, though luckily not any murderers, and I well remember her account of the boards set up in the piazzas and the chilling cold. The water is ever-present in this book: the canals, the rain in Venice that inspired one of my favorite pieces of music, and the rising tides that drag at your feet and pour in over the tops of your boots.

I’ve been thinking a lot about book covers recently. This one, which shows the Basilica of San Marco reflected in a swirling puddle, accurately mirrors the content of the book but is confusing. If I hadn’t already been a fan of the series, the cover would not have enticed me to pick up the book.

An inhabitant of Three Pines dies during a séance and Inspector Gamache must decide if the cause is fright, evil spirits, or murder. This is the third book set in the small village just south of Montreal, and the familiar characters are back again. In the first book Still Life we were introduced to Gamache and his team, including the surly agent Yvette Nichol, and the charming and eccentric inhabitants of Three Pines, many of whom are artists. The villagers reminded me of the characters in Martha Grimes's mystery series.

In the second book A Fatal Grace we learned a more about Gamache's political struggles within the force. In this sense, the book began to remind of Donna Leon's excellent mystery series set in Venice featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti, one of whose main attractions is watching Brunetti negotiate the labyrinthine politics of the Venetian police force. However, I felt that the political aspect didn't mesh well with the humorous shenanigans of the eccentric village characters. Also, I was disappointed that the characters were not more complex.

In spite of my disappointment, I selected this third book because so many people gave it favorable reviews, some even calling it the best book they'd read all year. Also, that first book showed so much promise that I wanted to give the series another try.

Penny's prose is easy to read: her sentences are lovely, and the pacing is very good. However, the story didn't engage my attention. The characters continue to be one-dimensional; none of them drew me in and made me live inside the story. Also, the addition of supernatural elements—a witch, a couple of séances, a malevolent house—to an already uneasy stew of eccentric village characters and political machinations made it hard to know how to feel about the story.

Writing a series of books featuring the same set of characters allows the author unusual scope to develop those characters over time. For example, it's been very interesting to observe the changes in Dalziel and Pascoe in Reginald Hill's series, both their personal changes and the changes in their relationship.

However, a series also presents some pretty serious challenges. Along with character development, there has to be enough background to remind or inform readers of who the characters are and what has happened previously, without giving away important plot points from previous books and without boring the reader who is very familiar with the series. Laura Lippman and Nevada Barr do a good job of this. Also, in a non-mystery series, J.K. Rowling does an amazing job of sneaking in the necessary information from previous books, which is ironic since most of her fans have the earlier books memorized anyway.

Here, the reminders of details from Penny's earlier books are worked in very well. I wish the characters were more interesting and the tone more consistent. On the other hand, many people loved this book, so perhaps it is just a question of personal taste.

I first saw the film The Bad Seed when I was 10 or 11 and didn’t quite know what to make of it. Was it possible that people could be born bad? For weeks I pondered questions of fate and free will, thinking too about the myths and legends I’d read: Oedipus destined to kill his father and marry his mother, Sleeping Beauty ordained from birth to prick her finger on a spindle.

Home retells the events of Robinson’s earlier book Gilead (which I blogged about in February) from the point of view of Glory, daughter of John Ames’s great friend Boughton and sister of the ne’er-do-well Jack. As the story opens, Glory has returned to Gilead to care for her elderly father who is nearing the end of his life. Then one day Jack, from whom they have heard not a word for decades, suddenly turns up, graceful, shabby, hungover.

I spent a lot of time thinking about Jack. The people of Gilead think that he was born bad, given the things he got up to when he was a boy. Ames sees Jack as a rogue, with a rakish self-confidence, who is a disruptive influence on Ames’s family. Glory sees Jack as broken and lonely, disgusted with himself, and inexpressibly weary.

I know people like him: smart, talented, charismatic, the golden child, yet somehow never quite succeeding in life, ending up existing on the fringes of society. It is not an easy thing, forging your own path instead of following the wide, paved road dictated by society. The stereotype is that such a person is a criminal or an addict, hating himself, just as Glory sees Jack. But I have known more than one lone wolf who is happy with his or her life, who still believes the benefits of going your own way outweigh the costs. Society may aver that they would be happier married, with two children and a dog, working 9-5 to pay the mortgage on a house behind a white picket fence, but they know better.

Glory is the one who wants all that, but seems destined never to have it. She longs for children and her own home, which she envisions as a modern cottage full of light and air. However, she is amazingly patient with her father, whose increasing demands and combination of irritation and sentimentality will be only too familiar to those who have dealt with aging parents or geriatric patients.

Jack and Glory are not the only characters I found myself sympathising with. Just as Ames’s worried about how his wife and young son would manage after his death, so Boughton’s last days are tormented by worry about Jack.

I liked this book better than Gilead though I missed Ames’s voice and his appreciative and positive view of the world. I’m still left with the impression of secrets unrevealed, revelations withheld. I have my own ideas of what they may be, but will leave you to discover your own.

Was it just last week I said I was tired of male coming-of-age stories? This month’s pick for one of my book clubs, Diaz’s book hooked me with its unusual and refreshing voice. It’s the story not just of Oscar but of his whole family: his mother Beli who emigrated from the Dominican Republic, his sister Lola, even his grandfather Abelard. Narrated by Lola’s boyfriend Yunior, their life in Paterson, New Jersey, fizzes across the page, full of the humiliations that overweight, RPG-playing Oscar must endure, the power that adolescent Lola finds, and the melodramatic scenes their mother enacts. The family is convinced that they suffer under a curse, a fuku that dooms all of their endeavours to failure.

Sure enough, each undergoes trials that bring them nearly to the end of reason. One or another retreats back to DR, taking refuge with La Inca, Abelard’s now-elderly cousin who had rescued and raised Beli. Dropping into the lives of Lola, Beli and Abelard rescued the book for me from being simply a boy’s coming-of-age story, though Oscar’s story even with its familiar adolescent-boy concerns was interesting enough to stand alone, given Yunior’s spirited narration.

Some people in my book club found the book hard to read, distracted by the frequent and untranslated Spanish phrases or put off by the occasional footnotes explaining in sometimes hilarious detail the historical or political background to some Dominican event or personage. None of that bothered me. Carried along by the raucous and witty voice of Yunior, I felt as though I had plunged into these lives that carry the weight of their country’s history, a country about which I’d known very little.

Curiously, I did agree with those in my book club who said they did not seem to care about the characters; they didn’t find themselves fretting over the characters’ bad choices or grieving over their fates as one does when truly caught up in a novel. I, too, was entertained without my emotions being particularly engaged. I’m not sure why that is. I felt that I didn’t really know Oscar and his family, which was only to be expected since Yunior did not really know them. In fact, the progression of the book is not only the events of their lives, but also Yunior’s coming to understand their significance and the family themselves. Yet, Yunior himself is not even a character for most of the book, just a shadow, an absent narrator. And Lola narrates her own section, another curious choice. She too has a wonderful voice, saying of her mother: “She stood like she was her own best thing . . .”.

These structural oddities are precisely what continue to interest me, even after the echoes of that marvelous voice have faded. I’ve certainly read many stories where the narrator is not actively a part of the story and many where he or she is, but I cannot think of another one where the narrator is peripheral to the story for part of the book and then actively present in the rest. Like the footnotes and the many allusions, these oddities and not knowing what to expect next kept me turning pages. I certainly recommend this book as a most unusual reading experience.

Written between 1954 and 1976, though not published until 1981, Lanark is the second book most mentioned by readers responding to an article in The Guardian asking for the best post-war British novel. Under the Volcano was the first.

Half of this book is a coming-of-age story of Duncan Thaw in pre-war Glasgow, an unsurprising account of the usual obsessions of the young men in such tales: sex, embarrassment, sex, trying to impress other men, sex, girls, fame, sex. Only willing to do the schoolwork that interests him (art, literature, and history), he is the despair of his widower father, whose highest ambition for his son is that he get a steady job while Duncan’s own dream is to create the greatest artwork his city has ever seen.

The other half of the book is a post-modern fable about Lanark, a young man who finds himself in the city of Unthank, which happens to resemble Glasgow, where he mopes about and wishes he had friends. Time plays strange tricks in this alternate world where the sun never shines except, occasionally, for a brief moment at dawn. Lanark, however, is as unsurprised and accepting of the bizarre jumps in time as he is of all the other fantastic happenings in Unthank.

While waking up as a loner in Unthank, with stones and shells in his pockets and as desperate for sunlight as for a woman to love, is certainly better than waking up as cockroach, Lanark finds misery enough. Beset by forces he doesn’t understand, meeting the same people over and over in different guises, he sometimes seems as hapless and innocent as Candide. As he tangles with the powers that run the place—the Council, the mysterious Institute where he is confined, and various mega-corporations—he begins to grasp the so-far elusive rules of the game that is his life.

Like the Lowry book, this is one I probably would have liked better if I’d read it when I was in college, immersed in existentialism and still new to the narrative tricks Gray plays here. By now I’ve read too many Bildungsroman, I guess, and listened to too many people describe bad trips. I’ve seen too many abuses of power and too much of the blind apathy of those abused.

Still, I must recognise and pay tribute to the imaginative brilliance that holds the book together and kept me reading to the end. Maybe it is just the wrong time of year to read this story, now when the daffodils fill the hillsides with sunlight and the tulip magnolias lift great armfuls of creamy pink blossoms to the cerulean sky.

Although this novel starts off with young Jiro, who is on his way to Osaka to meet a friend with whom he plans spend a vacation climbing Mt. Koya, the story is really about Jiro’s brother Ichiro. One of Soseki’s later novels, it was written during 1912-3 and appeared as a serial in Asahi, a large daily newspaper. Thus each of the four parts is divided into multiple short sections, each one standing alone as a short short story and yet tied to the others by the overall narrative arc and theme. Scenes are carried over between sections, so that each acts almost as an enjambed line of poetry. This fracturing of the story reinforces Soseki’s exploration of the chaos of modern life.

In Osaka, Jiro stays with a happily married couple, the man being a distant relation, while he waits for his friend Misawa to join him. Jiro has also been charged with meeting and assessing a man who has asked to arrange a marriage with a woman under the care of Jiro’s parents. These events and the stories told by Misawa once Jiro catches up to him—one of a divorced woman and one of a geisha—seem at first unrelated to the second part of the book, when Jiro’s mother, brother and sister-in-law arrive in Osaka on a spur-of-the-moment vacation and carry Jiro off to Wakayama.

However, it gradually becomes clear that marriages good and bad, arranged and romantic are constants in this narrative. Suffering from a kind of existential crisis, Ichiro’s marriage to Nao is in trouble. Ichiro even suspects that his feckless younger brother Jiro has been carrying on with Nao, and voices despairing references to Paolo and Francesca from Dante’s Inferno. The third part of the book covers the period after they all return to Tokyo from their travels. As Ichiro and Nao’s marriage continues to deteriorate, Nao is tight-lipped, refusing to argue or complain, while Ichiro seems close to a nervous breakdown.

The fourth part, in an odd break that Soseki manages to smooth over, is narrated, not by Jiro like the first three, but by a friend of Ichiro’s who has accompanied Jiro’s brother on further travels in the hopes of saving him. This friend has found his comfort in religion and recounts, in a long letter to Jiro, the discussions he has had with Ichiro about religion, marriage and Nietzsche.

This summary may make the book sound like a domestic drama, but it is far more, infused as it is with Soseki’s persistent theme of the anguish associated with the shift from Japan’s feudal past to a modern society. Both Ichiro and Nao try to find space for their independent concerns within the restrictions of their arranged marriage and the world of Ichiro’s conservative parents. Ichiro and Nao strive to become, as we would say today, self-actualised, caught between the formalised order of the past—church, state and family—and the new individualism, rejecting prescribed solutions. Ichiro says at one point, “‘To die, to go mad, or to enter religion—these are the only three courses left open for me.'”

The book was the more interesting to me in that I had just reread Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra and was curious to see those ideas played out in the lives of ordinary people. The characters I found most interesting, though, were the women: Ichiro’s wife Nao who could not go wandering off like her husband to seek consolation for her existential angst, the demented woman in Misawa’s story who clutched after her long-divorced husband, Jiro’s sister Oshige for whom he is tasked with finding a husband. Perhaps I will write more about Soseki’s female characters in another post.

I don’t think I ‘d ever even heard of this novel before seeing it named by many people in response to an article in The Guardian asking for the best post-war British novel. First published in 1948 though taking him over ten years to write, it is set in and around the Mexican town of Quauhnahuac, based on Cuernavaca where Lowry lived with his first wife. I expect that Under the Volcano has often been compared to Ulysses since it covers one day in the life of Geoffrey Firmin—usually referred to by his title, the Consul, though he has recently resigned—and that day’s experiences seem to embody not only the Consul’s entire life, but the lives of an entire generation, perhaps western civilisation itself.

The Consul is an alcoholic and most of the stream-of-consciousness narrative takes place within his mind. On this day, 2 November, the Day of the Dead, the Consul emerges from a night of drinking with a new acquaintance, a local doctor named Vigil, to find that his estranged wife, Yvonne, whose loss he has grieved and used to justify his continued drinking, has unexpectedly returned. A phrase that recurs to the Consul often is No se puede vivir sin amar, which I believe means one cannot live without love. He has long believed that if only Yvonne would return, he could master his craving for alcohol and build a good life with her.

However, complicating her return is not only his continued drinking, but also the presence of the Consul’s younger brother, Hugh, who has just quit his job as a journalist and plans to embark that very evening to volunteer in the Spanish Civil War. Apparently there has been some improper relationship between Hugh and Yvonne in the past which precipitated her departure.

This is a book I appreciated more than enjoyed. I found it hard to warm up to the characters and have to say I didn’t care what happened to them. However, I was overwhelmed by the intense physicality of the descriptions of the Consul’s garden and road, the town, the cantinas, the countryside. The area is split in two by a great ravine and dwarfed by two volcanoes. I also recognise Lowry’s immense achievement in constructing this book, the way apparently random scenes and details fall together, the use of repetition and “found” phrases, such as the signs plastered on the walls advertising the Peter Lorre film Las Manos de Orlac, which I remember being terrified by the first time I saw it.

In many ways I liked this book better than Ulysses. It is more true to the world as I know it, with the breakdown of order, the fracturing of experience, the mistrust of memory. I also liked the way both the Consul and Yvonne long for Canada as their imagined paradise. The Consul owns an island in British Columbia, and the two imagine—without being able to communicate their visions to each other—how much better life would be there, away from the snares and entanglements of Mexico.

I’ve been talking in the blog about Soseki and the way his novels (written from 1909 to 1915) reflect the shift in Japanese culture from the formal order of the past to the individualisation and chaos of the present. With Lowry’s novel, we are plunged in the maelstrom, the chaos of one man’s mind as he struggles to order his memories and perceptions against the beloved and nefarious effects of mescal and tequila and whisky. We are thrust into this chaos without—as Stephen Spender points out in his introduction—even the cultural framework that Joyce provides. The only thing these characters have to sustain themselves is his or her own individual past.

Lowry’s book reminds me of Toni Morrison’s A Mercy which I blogged about last week, where each character is isolated in his or her experience, even as they knock at the door to paradise. The paradises in these two books are lost ones and, since Proust’s books had just been translated into English, perhaps Lowry had Proust’s words in mind as he started writing this book. Under the Volcano is a difficult book to read, but well worth the effort.