SPECIAL EDITION
Bay Area Readers on Their Most Treasured Books
Grant Faulkner is the executive director of National Novel Writing Month and the author of “Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Prompts to Boost Your Creative Mojo,” published this month by Chronicle Books.
I’d just been dumped in the dramatic manner that only a 22-year-old can be. My salve, as unhealthy as it might have been, was to immerse myself in tragic novels with characters careening through the fiery hells of rejection. The more self-destructive, the better. The best in this genre turned out to be “Under the Volcano,” by Malcolm Lowry, which tells the story of Geoffrey Firmin, an alcoholic British consul in Mexico who tries to reunite with his estranged wife when she returns on the Day of the Dead in 1938.
The novel is many things at once. It’s harrowing and lyrical and tangled. It’s religious and mystical and political. Its fervid writing, sodden by Lowry’s own extreme alcoholism and the many mezcals Firmin lifts to right himself, teems with symbolism and literary references.
In the vertiginous swirl of it all, one line of graffiti centers the story: “No se puede vivir sin amar” (”One cannot live without love”). The line weaves its way not only through Firmin’s lunging soul, but into the story of an era when fascism was emerging, when much of the world was splitting apart. It was written in the ’40s, but it tells the story of what’s happening in the world today.
After reading it, I traveled to Mexico and wrote my own big sprawling sentences, but I couldn’t possibly emulate it. I reread it every few years now, my dog-eared paperback practically crumbling in my hands. Many of my favorite novels from my younger days don’t truly hold up to the test of time, but “Under the Volcano” remains unfathomable, as the best books always are.