Ultramarine by Malcolm Lowry
What makes this book interesting is the way Lowry can put you in the middle of the action so immediately and intimately, the style characteristically his own. This is also what I loved about
Under the Volcano
and has me now on the quest to read all of his stuff. There’s dialogue and slang and unattributed conversations, distinct voices allowed to roll over one another as the
Oedipus
does the waves and wandering mind of Dana whose interior searching becomes a slipstream of images that take us from the metal interior of the boat to the psychedelic interior of his mind, with people and images and flashes of love and longing shooting all around: “My yearnings sailed over sea and evening and dawn; and for the first time I felt I knew the meaning of the city, where all nights could intoxicate and torment, and where all hearts spin towards the light and burn themselves in its fire, whose nerves are played to death and sing like violins in defiance and painful exultation, because we still exist – “ (86)