The Voyage That Never Ends: Fictions Poems Fragments Letters

About this book

A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS ORIGINAL Notorious for a misspent life full of binges blackouts and unimaginable bad luck Malcolm Lowry managed against every odd to complete and publish two novels one of them Under the Volcano an indisputable masterpiece. At the time of his death in 1957 Lowry also left behind a great deal of uncollected and unpublished writing: stories novellas drafts of novels and revisions of drafts of novels (Lowry was a tireless revisiter and reviserand interrupterof his work) long impassioned haunting beautiful letters overflowing with wordplay and lament fraught short poems that display a sozzled off-the-cuff inspiration all Lowrys own. Over the years these writings have appeared in various volumes all long out of print. Here in The Voyage That Never Ends the poet translator and critic Michael Hofmann has drawn on all this scattered and inaccessible material to assemble the first book that reflects the full range of Lowrys extraordinary and singular achievement. The result is a revelation. In the lettersacknowledged to be among modern literatures greatestwe encounter a character who was as contemporaries attested as spellbinding and lovable as he was self-destructive and infuriating. In the late fictionthe long story Through the Panama sections of unfinished novels such as Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid and the little-known La Mordidawe discover a writer who is blazing a path into the unknown and as he goes improvising a whole new kind of writing. Lowry had set out to produce a great novel something to top Under the Volcano a multivolume epic and intimate tale of purgatorial suffering and ultimate redemption (called among other things The Voyage That Never Ends). That book was never to be. What he produced instead was an unprecedented and prophetic blend of fact and fiction confession and confusion essay and free play that looks forward to the work of writers as different as Norman Mailer and William Gass but is like nothing else. Almost in spite of himself Lowry succeeded in transforming his disastrous life into an exhilarating art of disaster. The Voyage That Never Ends is a new and indispensable entry into the world of one of the masters of modern literature.