Recommendations
Books Like Under the Volcano
What to read after Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano (1947) is one of the most difficult and most rewarding novels of the twentieth century — Geoffrey Firmin's last day in Mexico, the alcoholism that is both literal and symbolic, the political catastrophe of 1938 always present in the background. The novel that T.S. Eliot considered the greatest twentieth-century novel after Ulysses. These novels will find you in the same territory.
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Ulysses
by James Joyce
Leopold Bloom's one day in Dublin — the canonical predecessor to Under the Volcano in the tradition of the modernist novel organized around a single day; where Joyce's day is expansive and encyclopedic, Lowry's is concentrated and infernal; both novels require the same kind of slow, attentive reading, and both reward it with an experience available from no other novels
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The Sun Also Rises
by Ernest Hemingway
Jake Barnes and the Lost Generation in Paris and Pamplona — the American novel of the same period (the 1920s) that most directly anticipates Under the Volcano in its portrait of an expatriate who drinks to fill the void left by the war; where Lowry's Consul is in the final stages of alcoholic self-destruction, Hemingway's Jake Barnes is in the early stages; both are portraits of men whom the war has unmanned in different ways
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Ask the Dust
by John Fante
Arturo Bandini, a young Italian-American writer in 1930s Los Angeles, obsessed with becoming a great novelist and with Camilla Lopez — the American counterpart to Under the Volcano in the tradition of the alcoholic self-destruction novel; less symbolically dense than Lowry but equally intense; Charles Bukowski called it the greatest American novel, and it belongs to the same tradition
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The Alexandria Quartet
by Lawrence Durrell
Alexandria in the 1930s and 40s, told from four perspectives — Durrell and Lowry are exact contemporaries in the British modernist tradition of the maximalist, symbolically saturated novel set in an exotic location; The Alexandria Quartet (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea) is as densely written as Under the Volcano and equally demanding and rewarding
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Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
The Kid and the Judge in 1840s Texas and Mexico — McCarthy is the American writer who most directly inherited the tradition Lowry belongs to: the novel as an examination of the violence at the heart of history, rendered in prose of extraordinary density; where Lowry's Consul faces an inner apocalypse, McCarthy's characters face an outer one; both novels end in darkness without consolation
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The Moviegoer
by Walker Percy
Binx Bolling searching for the 'sovereign wayfarer' in 1950s New Orleans — Percy is the American Catholic novelist most directly in the tradition of existential crisis that Under the Volcano belongs to; where Lowry's crisis is alcoholic and political, Percy's is philosophical and religious; both are novels about men who cannot find a way to live in the world they have been given
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Sabbath's Theater
by Philip Roth
Morris Sabbath's last days, a compulsive satyr who has outlived almost everyone he loved — Roth's most Lowryan novel in its portrait of a man in the final stages of self-destruction who is simultaneously the most alive character in the novel; where Lowry's Consul is destroyed by alcohol and history, Roth's Sabbath is destroyed by grief and desire; both are unflinching portraits of a kind of masculinity that consumes itself
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Pedro Páramo
by Juan Rulfo
Juan Preciado's journey to the Mexican village of Comala to find his father — Rulfo's short novel is the companion to Under the Volcano from the Mexican perspective; where Lowry uses Mexico as the infernal setting for a European self-destruction, Rulfo shows Mexico from the inside; Pedro Páramo influenced García Márquez and the entire Latin American magical realist tradition, and is the essential companion to any novel set in Mexico
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