Malcolm lowry 19476/12/2023 In the case of Malcolm Lowry, I've tried it both ways. It's odd to think how much a literary reputation depends on the author's implicit offer - or threat - to do it again. How do we parlay the author of one great book into "a great author"? It's easy to stick to the great book, which you can read over and over, but you're left with the problem of one. And there is Ivan Goncharov, whose Oblomov I would be tempted to say is at least half a great book (in part two, if I remember, the sensationally supine Oblomov gets up and becomes a regulation protagonist, at which point I felt like a good lie-down myself). (Lowry had the least support - friends, family, serenity, health, money, jobs, work, pull, luck - of any writer I can think of.) Then there is the Austrian Jew Joseph Roth, another drunk in whom I've taken a special interest, author of the great novel of the dual monarchy, The Radetzky March. Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957), the English expatriate and alcoholic, is the author of Under the Volcano, set during one day in Mexico and written over the course of 10 years in circumstances of sublime obscurity and hardship in a fisherman's shack without water or electricity on the Canadian Pacific coast. What do we do with the author of one great book? It doesn't happen all that much, but it remains a category that challenges the way we think about books and about writers.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |