I. I AM WONDERING

I am wondering if books themselves have a life of their own or, more so, if every individual copy of a book sometimes does have an existence, and possibly a purpose, somehow very separate from the text. I’m not sure how new this idea is, but I suspect it has taken me to a place that could be new, or at least worth repeating.
Bear with me on this one.

II. CALLE DONCELES

Once in Mexico City I came upon a rather odd copy of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano in one of the used bookshops along Calle Donceles.
Calle Donceles is not far from the fine cathedral and regally resplendent red-stone administration buildings from the Spanish colonial regime on the huge public square of the Zócalo, blue mountains all around, and it’s in what I like to think of as the “literary” pocket of this the old quarter of the sprawling, modern city. Literary not because of any major publishing houses that I know of being located nearby, but because there are maybe a dozen of those bookshops clustered on narrow Donceles, one after another and with open fronts and shelves so high that wobbly wooden ladders are often needed to access the top tiers. The names of the shops offer wonderful titles on their own, like El Inframundo (The Underworld), El Laberinto (The Labyrinth), Los Hermanos de la Hoja (punningly, Brothers of the Page), and my favorite, overtly invoking the metaphysical, El Callejón de los Milagros (The Alley of Miracles). I love that street.
It was a sunny June afternoon, my last of this particular trip, and I had been thinking a lot about Lowry, author of that one masterpiece in his short life, Under the Volcano. The novel is among the landmark performances of late modernism indeed, a philosophically probing, full-language symphony telling of the final day in the life of an alcoholic British consul, Geoffrey Firman, who is called simply “the Consul"; he’s exiled to a meaningless diplomatic post in Cuernavaca, the beautiful mountain-resort town south of the capital and once the retreat of ill-fated Emperor Maximilian and Empress Carlotta. In fact, being close to obsessed with Lowry’s writing close to my entire adult life (more on this obsession later), I had once walked through just about every scene of the novel in Cuernavaca. And this time while in Mexico City I thought I might stay at the Hotel Canada, seeing as that was where Lowry himself usually put up whenever in the city from Cuernavaca with his first wife. Lowry lived a life of alcoholic dissolution in Mexico during 1936–38, and no need to document how the novel itself is intensely autobiographical, a critical given.