The Voyage That Never Ends Fictions, Poems, Fragments, Letters

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 At the time of his death in 1957, Lowry also left behind a great deal of uncollected and unpublished writing: stories, novellas, drafts of novels and revisions of drafts of novels (Lowry was a tireless revisiter and reviserand interrupterof his work), long,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 Lowry's own. Over the years these writings have appeared in various volumes, all long out of print. Here, inThe 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 Lowry's extraordinary and singular achievement. The result is a revelation. In the lettersacknowledged to be among modern literature's 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 asDark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid, and the little-knownLa 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 topUnder 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 Endsis a new and indispensable entry into the world of one of the masters of modern literature.

Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957) was born in the English county of Cheshire, and was educated at Cambridge University. Obsessed with both alcohol and literature, he lived briefly in London, meeting Dylan Thomas, then moved to France where he married his first wife, Jan Gabrial, in 1934. Lowry followed her to New York, Hollywood, and in 1936, to the Mexican city of Cuernavaca. Divorced and then deported from the country, in 1939, he moved to Canada, marrying his second wife, Margerie Bonner, an actress and writer. Continuing to drink excessively, Lowry died in the village of Ripe, East Sussex, where he was living with his wife. He is best known for his novel Under the Volcano.

Michael Hofmann was born in Freiburg, Germany, and moved to England in 1961. He won a Cholmondelay Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for his poetry. His translations of German prose, including works by Brecht, Kafka, Koeppen and Roth, have won the Independent's Foreign Fiction Award, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the Schlegel-Tieck Translation award (twice).