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Editorial Review Product Description
Though she wrote only one novella, one short play, and fewer than a dozen short stories over a roughly twenty-year span from the early 1940s to the mid-1960s, Jane Bowles has long been regarded by critics as one of the premier stylists of her generation. Enlivened at unexpected moments by sexual exploration, mysticism, andflashes of wit alternately dry and hilarious, her prose is spare and honed,her stories filled with subtly sly characterizations of men and, mostly, women, dissatisfied not so much with the downward spiral of their fortunes as with the hollowness of their neat little lives. Whether focused on the separate emergences of Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield from their affluent, airless lives in New York and Panama into a less definedbutintense sexual and social maelstrom in the novella Two Serious Ladies, or on the doomed efforts of the neighbors Mr. Drake and Mrs. Perry to form a connection out of their very different lonelinessin "Plain Pleasures," or on the bittersweet cultural collision of an American wife and a peasant woman inMorocco in "Everything Is Nice," Jane Bowles creates whole worlds out of the unexpressed longings of individuals, adrift in their own lives, whether residing in their childhood homes or in faraway lands that are somehow bothstranger andmore familiar than what they left behind.
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essential reading
Jane Bowles writing is disturbing and contains little if no plot structure. Her stories seem to hint at broader psychological meanings or subtle epiphanies. All the stories and novellas in My Sister's Hand in Mine are written in third person. Bowles employs free indirect discourse, making the thoughts of her protagonists, the tones of their dialog, and their (often bizarre) psychological motivations drive the narrative. This form allows the reader to be inside the character's head--while preserving an outside, mysterious perspective and sense of distanced narrative authority.
A classic example of this technique is the short story A Stick of Green Candy, in which a little girl named Mary spends her days in a clay pit beside the highway pretending to be the leader of a group of soldiers. Mary's family would like her to play at the playground with other children but she detests it. Her military game seems juxtaposed to her outward appearance, but it is an excellent illustration of her inner world which is obsessive and competitive:
"She was a scrupulously clean child with a strong immobile face and long well arranged curls. Sometimes when she went home towards evening there were traces of clay on her dark coat, even though she had worked diligently with the brush she carried along every afternoon. She despised untidiness, and she feared that the clay might betray her headquarters, which she suspected the other children of trying to invade."
The description moves quickly from an exterior description of Mary hinting at her interior world--the `strong immobile face' to her habits and eventually deeper feelings--in this case suspicion and paranoia about other children.
Mary's soldier's training camp is invaded by a little boy who lives across the street from the clay pit. He simply stops by to play with her, and she ends up leaving `her men' to follow him home. The little boy's mother explains to her that he is not like a real boy--but has `got some girl in him thank the lord.' Then the boy gives Mary a stick of green candy. This interaction inspires Mary to do something she has never done--to view her `training camp' from above--on the highway.
"After gazing down at the sparkling lights for a while, she began to breathe more easily. She had never experienced the need to look at things from a distance before, nor had she flet the relief it that it can bring. All at once, the air stirring around her seemed delightful; she drank in great draughts of it, her eyes fixed on the lights below. She felt her blood tingle as it always did whenever she scored a victory."
The next day this feeling of perspective and distance has made her change her soldiers schedules, they all wait for the little boy to come back to the clay pit. There is something about the little boy that is just like Mary. The third person narration concisely provides her feelings.
"Surely he knew that all the while his mother was talking, she in secret had been claiming him for her own. He would come out soon and join her on the steps, and they would go away together."
But the little boy doesn't show up to play, though she believes he is watching her through his window. Mary eventually walks away from her soldiers alone.
Through free indirect discourse Bowles illustrates very subtly, sweetly and without any overt narrative analysis, the isolating and yearning experiences of children who do not feel at home with the expectations that come with their gender.
Disappointing
I really wish I could jump on the bandwagon of singing Jane Bowles' praises, but I haven't been able to understand what all the fuss is about. "The greatest novelist of the century?"Whoa--this is not on my list of the top 100. I've long been a great fan of Paul Bowles--surely one of the most intense and talented writers of the last century--and Jane sounded interesting in all the reviews, but after reading both Camp Cataract and Two Serious Ladies, and several other of the stories, I was disappointed.Almost all are about odd, neurotic women with overpowering urges to escape their dreary lives of conformity, and/or who relate to other odd, neurotic women in strangely belligerant ways. All of the male characters are pathetic and superfluous, or are at least treated that way by women who have no use for them.
I found it frustrating that all of the characters constantly make decisions, or say things, that seem without any apparent motivation.It's very difficult to get a read on why any of the characters do what they do.A woman who seems to have been content all her life to live a staid, "respectable" existence decides she's going to be a prostitute.Why?Then she decides not to.Why?There's no explanation, in either inner monologue, dialogue, background plot, or anything--the characters just do things that seem...strange.I like strange--Paul Bowles, for example, can be very strange, and it's fascinating--but Jane seems to keep writing, I assume, about herself, in the obsessive manner of thenarcissist who can't stop thinking and talking and writing about her personal concerns as though they were universal.And maybe they are universal, among lesbians, I can't say.
Paul Bowles is timeless--his stories could have been written yesterday.Jane's are musty and dated, as well as very unsatisfying.They may be very fertile ground for exploring Jane's psyche, but if that's not of primary interest to you, you may find yourself finishing one story after another saying "Now what was that all about?"
A must have item.
Jane Bowles is still an unfortunately neglected writer despite Tennessee Williams' statement that she is our finest American prose fiction writer.He wrote that in the early 70s, and it is still true today.She manages to surprise and fascinate and perplex and amuse in nearly every sentence.She is the kind of original our university writing courses and the 'searching for a hit' publishing industry are stifling.
Night, Let Me Be Numbered Among Thy Sons And Daughters
My Sister's Hand In Mine: The Collected Works Of Jane Bowles (1970) offers readers the rewarding opportunity of entering the strange but oddly homey world of its author. The volume contains Bowles' only novel, Two Serious Ladies, her single work for the theater, the uneven In the Summer House, and thirteen short stories and unfinished pieces. The book's real strengths are Two Serious Ladies and the long story Camp Cataract, works that compliment one another and successfully define the unique landscape of Bowles' vision.
Married to the more famous novelist, composer, and expatriate Paul Bowles, Jane was an apparently bisexual woman with strong lesbian leanings. Thoughher liveliness and wit were widely appreciated by other artists of the period, most of whom were also ardent admirers of her talent, Bowles' life was compromised by anxiety, and her final years were marked by severe illness and tragedy.
The individualistic Bowles was probablyan introvert in Jung's original definition of term. Her character's fears largely revolve around the idea of "passage into the outside world," the states of existence that most people must inevitably face, embrace, and accept beyond the personalized state of the home and the nuclear family. But while confronting the outer world is a unpleasant necessity for most of Bowles' characters, family life, far from a paradise, remains a sentimentally idealized but claustrophobic circle in hell. Achieving and maintaining states of grace was also an important matter for the author, though her unsettlingly tragicomic approach to both thesethemes has historically kepther work from being widely understood and accepted as mainstream American literature.While other idiosyncratic writers like the vastly more prolific Muriel Spark have enjoyed decades of popularity and critical and commercial success and thus the opportunity to carefully evolve their personal vision, Bowles found the act of writing difficult, and her readership during her lifetime, in commercial terms, almost nonexistent.
Two Serious Ladies concerns Christina Goering and Frieda Copperfield, casual acquaintances who synchronistically strike out on no longer avoidable quests for personal salvation after meeting at a Manhattan party.
While Mrs. Copperfield seems to be seeking fulfilling love and all kinds of meaningful sensual pleasure, the independently wealthy Miss Goering apparently seeksspiritual development through material sacrifice, meager living, and confrontation with her fears in their social and public forms. Both women are simultaneously asexual and semi-consciously lesbian in their preferences; the married Mrs. Copperfield enthusiastically chases the love and company of other women in a Central American village, while the somewhat sheltered but more confident Miss Goering, who shares her home with both a woman and a man in an ambiguous arrangement, actively pursues first a failed businessman and then a gangster in the name of achieving her goals. Both women are weirdly naive, and Bowles never allows the reader a clear understanding of how knowledgeable, sophisticated, or self aware either character is. Both encounter and embrace a hilarious assemblage of oddball characters and misfits; like Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield, these eccentrics often seem incapable of objective or comparative perception, and may thus be doomed to lives of starchy parochialism. Only Mr. Copperfield, a figure unmistakably based on Paul Bowles, seems stable, clear-headed, and rationally self-motivated.
Unstable, indeterminate social conventions and mores haunt Bowles' characters. Routine train rides, visits to relative's homes, evenings out in taverns and restaurants, business meetings, and even the simple act of purchasing become comic war zones in which all present seem to enjoy a vastly different understanding of what behavior is appropriate and acceptable. Misunderstandings, breaches of etiquette, emotional hypersensitivity, and insults are common in The Collected Works Of Jane Bowles; fluid, trusting, easy, and healthy communication is sadly unknown.
The grueling Camp Cataract concerns a shrewd, secretive, and uncommonly self aware adult woman, Harriet, who is quietly and carefully planning a final break from her smothering and unconsciously incestuous sister Sadie. Unlike Two Serious Ladies, Camp Cataract contains surreal elements, fugue states, and odd flights of fantasy, but is also more far more specific about the intentions and inner workings of its characters: Harriet's desperate motivations are laid bear in a way that neither Miss Goering's and Mrs. Copperfield's ever are. During her alternately forlorn and energetic pursuit of her sister, Sadie isunpleasantly forced to confront the devouring public world she fears as well asthe heavily repressed psychosexual underpinnings of her character. Though wildly funny, few works of fiction can cause readers to twist and squirm like Camp Cataract.
Throughout, the writing is simple, subtle, admirably crisp, and compellingly readable; Bowles is also a master of peculiar, perfectly timed dialogue, a talent she uses to great effect throughout. Also notable are A Guatemalan Idyll, originally a section of Two Serious Ladies, and A Stick Of Green Candy, in which a young girl learns that violating the fidelity of her creative imagination brings about the permanent end of innocent fantasy.
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Incredible book. Jane Bowles has the unique characteristic of amusing and depressing us at the same time. Two serious ladies and her short fiction(Camp Catarat and Plain Pleasures are masterpieces) are unique. Her play is funny but she is not as good as in her narrative.
What you will find in this book is a complete diferent way of understanding live, you will encounter an original brain that expreses itself with the most personal sentences you will ever read. Jane stands alone in the whole literary tradition. Surrounded by her terror, obsessions and complete understanding of human heart what Bowles achieves is the perfect expression of human essence.
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