Just from the description of Cuernavaca on November 2, 1939, in the novel Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry would have already gone down in the history of literature. With two novels published during his lifetime, the British writer has represented the limits of rupture, the journey that alcohol, mezcal and tequila project between life and literature in a journey of no return. The way of writing and the firm devotion to literature condition the entire spectrum of his works. In fact, his life was already transformed when he gave up continuing the family businesses to seclude himself between alcohol and creativity in an almost mystical duality.
Lowry is a romantic myth of a way of creating until destruction. Also to recreate it and focus it on the future, where it will undoubtedly remain. The British is a writer who has created a proselytism that continues the line of the French symbolists and who connects with the North American beatniks without remission. In fact, after the long-awaited Spanish-American translations, Bruguera decided to pour into his brand new narrative collection Bajo elvolcano and other of his pocket novels, for example the extraordinary Dark as the Tomb Where My Friend Lies, in 1981.
Later, Tusquets Editores collected the legacy and has offered us all of Lowry’s works, just as Visor did with his poetry, Malpaso with the unpublished Rumbo al Mar Blanco and now Random House with La mordida, another unpublished Mexican-themed work, in which explains the vicissitudes of his return to Mexico, specifically to Acapulco, with his new wife, from Canada. A novel to a certain extent autobiographical, La mordida proposes a return to the inspiration that led him to achieve Bajo elvolcano. Unfinished, but with many chapters that contain the best Lowry, the edition arrives impeccable by Patrick A. McCarthy and with a translation by Maria Vinós that achieves “an intervention that is the least violent, the most similar to the effect that the appearance of a language other than that of the reader in the original.” Vinós – like good sports referees – disappears and the text flows between the parentheses that the editor McCarthy introduces to refer to the origin, whether it is a notebook, some notes from the author or a typed chapter. Could you say that it is a novel for philologists? Yes, but there are entire chapters finished or very outlined in which Lowry’s genius appears in all its splendor.
Furthermore, The Bite, unlike Under the Volcano and other hallucinated Lowry narratives, is more focused on the bureaucratic via crucis – from which the title comes – that prevents him from settling comfortably and he is continually threatened with expulsion. Lowry traveled to Mexico in October 1936 and stayed there for two years. The second attempt was in 1945 with the aim of expanding his inspiration to Dark as the Tomb Where My Friend Lies and to this La Mordida, which maintains many affinities with his previous works, from characters to memories such as the shooting murder of his friend Juan Fernando. in a cantina timba.
There is everything in the novel, from descents into hell, as only he can achieve them, to stream-of-consciousness exercises, which are less cloying than many of his British compatriots, including Joyce, who also appears reflected. In fact, Dark… and The Bite, according to what the editor tells us, had to be part of the diptych The Journey That Never Ends, which was put on hold due to the death of the writer at the age of forty-eight. The importance of these texts is, in my view, above Bajo elvolcano, both because of the ambition and because “the central question is the possibility of redeeming his life by transforming his experiences into a work of art.” , as summarized by Patrick A. McCarthy. The rebirth of the protagonist Sigbjon – fundamental in different works by the British – is one of the conclusions of a work that had to make Lowry himself rise from the ashes of alcohol where his life combusted.
