Customer Reviews (1)

The Master of Lucid Insanity and Polished Miscommunication
Like H.P. Lovecraft, Paul Bowles was an early admirer of Edgar Allen Poe's work. His collected short works (67 stories and essays, and one stunning short novel) is a treasurehouse of polished gems of a most peculiar variety. Bowles' specialty is in leaving the reader disconcerted, uncomfortable--even annoyed and sometimes horrified. His prose is lapidary--effortless, clear, and dangerous in the extreme. His psychological realism focuses on the darker sides of humanity--the ignorant, the misguided, the superstitious, the incomprehending, and the insane. His stories often seem to end without resolution. However, "seem" is the key word: Bowles clearly revels in the creation of states of ill ease in his readers. One might deem him H.P. Lovecraft on Prozak: restrained, controlled, but nevertheless a master of horror. Bowles' horror is all the more powerful for being so eloquent and dispassionate.

By far the best work of this volume, and probably of Bowles' entire corpus, is the concluding short novel UP ABOVE THE WORLD. It's devastating. Nightmarish, even fiendish in its narrative technique, I'm surprised that Hollywood never has attempted a version. Its vision has been called, not inappropriately, nihilistic: the bad guys here quite clearly win. Nevertheless, it bears witness to a darkness that sincerely pervades our modern world, doubtlessly more than we would care to acknowledge.

Bowles specializes in exploring the minds of characters who don't comprehend their environments, whether social or physical. As readers, we ourselves beccome trapped by the limitations of these often pathetic, sometimes horrendous denizens of the global village. He's especially good at entering the minds of non-Western characters. I should think our forces in Iraq would do well to be intimate with Bowles' astute psychological voyages.

Bowles never will be for everyone. He's too intelligent, too polished, and too dark. I view him as a kind of vaccine against complacency in these current times of overwhelming anomie. ... Read more

Product Description

The short fiction of American literary cult figure Paul Bowles is marked by a unique, delicately spare style, and a dark, rich, exotic mood, by turns chilling, ironic, and wry—possessing a symmetry between beauty and terror that is haunting and ultimately moral. In "Pastor Dowe at TecatÉ," a Protestant missionary is sent to a faraway place where his God has no power. In "Call at CorazÓn," an American husband abandons his alcoholic wife on their honeymoon in a South American jungle. In "Allal," a boy's drug-induced metamorphosis into a deadly serpent leads to his violent death. Here also are some of Bowles's most famous works, including "The Delicate Prey," a grimly satisfying tale of vengeance, and "A Distant Episode," which Tennessee Williams proclaimed "a masterpiece."

Customer Reviews (6)

Where the bogeyman is all-too-real...
In a collection of stories this hefty--a sampling filling well over 600 pages and covering every phase of Bowles's long and prolific writing career--you'd expect to find more than your share of duds. But such is not the case here. In fact, there are hardly any stories in this volume that you could consider an out-and-out "dud."

Stephen King once wrote that the ultimate tale of terror is one in which the reader senses that any character, at any time, including the narrator, could die. Bowles seems to write with this dictum in mind. His stories are almost always ominous because of the sense that no one is invulnerable from the dark currents of violence that run just under the surface of life. Even when nothing especially horrific happens, the reader finds himself tense with expectation and breathing something like a sigh of relief. That most of these stories are set in exotic locales, difficult of access and strange of custom, where the "civilized" white, whether tourist or expatriate, is always an outsider only emphasizes what seems to me a constant in Bowles's outlook whether the story is set in Tangier or Tucson--that life is a state of affairs where we are never completely at home. We're always interlopers, just passing through; no matter how long we stay, we'll never be a native; we'll never truly belong.

And so misunderstandings abound--and some of these misinterpretations, whether of the people, the customs, or the landscape, all of them equally unfamiliar and mysterious, can be fatal.

Bowles writes a beautifully clear and straightforward prose that is nonetheless deft enough to express the subtlest psychological nuances. He is famously unsentimental, but not at all unfeeling. As he explains in one of the stories in this volume, emotions are precisely what we can't put into words. So Bowles confines himself to saying what can be said and leaves out the rest. And what can be said is more than enough to point the sensitive reader to all that must remain mute...except for sobs and screams.

Many of these stories end with a shock, but just as many end with a kind of existential "flatness" until you realize that the climax came some pages before and suddenly the shock reverberates inside you like a well-placed, time-delayed bomb.

Some of the later stories in this volume, written when Bowles was heading into his twilight years, seem almost to cross over into the realm of reminiscences and travel essays, others retellings of Middle Eastern fables, rather than proper short stories, but still they have the power to hold a reader's interest, bearing as they do in this volume, the cumulative weight of all the stories that came before them.

A collection of consistently disquieting stories, this volume brings together a generous sampling of the kind of dread far more terrifying than what can be found in any horror novel. Because in these stories, the source of the terror is all too real, all too much of the everyday world we live in.

The Most Under-ratd American Author
This collection certifies Bowles brilliance. I have enjoyed his novels, but these fascinating short stories reveal him to be one of the greatest American writers of the century, perhaps the most under-rated American writer. I like the fact that his stories are often set in exotic locals like Morocco, S. America, Mexico, and Thailand. He is also good with stories about expats as well as those written form the point of view of locals, some of these stories comes across like parables.

There are several memorable stories, but"A Distant Episode" in particular is brilliant.It's about an ethnologist who goes to study a distant tribe and is drugged fed mushrooms, has his tongue cut out and made to dance before the tribe. His later stories lose none of his precision in story telling either; it is a solid body of work. Highly recommended, however buy the paperback it's a bit of a doorstop at 657 pages.

More Bowles is Always Better
Once you enter the smoky world of Bowles' winding alleys and doublespeaking faux guides, you won't remember how to get back to where you were before.Was is this turn?Behind that door?

For Paul Bowles fans-this is a "must have".
After reading Paul Bowles "The Sheltering Sky" twice, I could not consume enough of his writing.He was to me, a writer's writer.He has a way of pulling you into his adventures without overloading you with minute useless details.His writing just flows from sentence to sentence while the reader is swept away effortlessly along whatever path he is taking.Obviously I am a big fan and having this huge collection of short stories was something I had to have for my Paul Bowles collection.Also check out "My Sister's Hand In Mine"a collection of short stories written by Paul Bowles wife, Jane Bowles, it's equally intriguing.What a fasinating life they must have had!

heart of darkness
A beautiful collection that certainly beats the old reliable Black Sparrow book. This is a class treatment of one of the best writers working the middle part of the century. (The intro is not particulary illuminating, however.) The lengthy review here by Doug Anderson gets the job done if you are new to Bowles. What strikes one upon revisiting Bowles is how contemporary he was in tone. These are hard-edged stories, dark and mysterious. World literature. A must collection for any serious reader of 20th century writing. ... Read more

Product Description

In Let It Come Down, Paul Bowles plots the doomed trajectory of Nelson Dyar, a New York bank teller who comes to Tangier in search of a different life and ends up giving in to his darkest impulses. Rich in descriptions of the corruption and decadence of the International Zone in the last days before Moroccan independence, Bowles's second novel is an alternately comic and horrific account of a descent into nihilism.

Customer Reviews (17)

Staring at the Sun
This is one of I think only four full length novels that Bowles wrote, and each of them satisfies in a different way.
In this book one follows the central character, a New Yorker transplanted into a strange land to begin life afresh, having found no meaning in his previous boring existence. What meaning he will find, and what exactly his new job will be, or even if there really is one, is not clear, and he drifts in an alien society, reacting to what he finds around him. We are pulled onwards with, like him, no idea about where things are heading until out of laziness or ennui, he begins to make decisions that begin to build walls around him.
There are several strong characters in the story who one can imagine beyond the end of the story, continuing their different trajectories, but mostly what stays with me is the way that Bowles unflinchingly takes Dyar on towards his fate.

Pathetic Loner Discovers Paranoia and Principle in his Character
Nelson Dyar, a thirtyish bank teller, makes a rash decision and takes a poorly defined job in Tangier. In New York, Dyar had "fallen prey to a demoralizing sensation of motionlessness. His own life was a dead weight, so heavy that he would never be able to move it from where it lay. He had grown accustomed to the feeling of intense hopelessness and depression..."

In Tangier, Dyar expects to become "another person, full of life, delivered from the sense of despair that weighed on him for so long." But instead, Bowles shows how Dyar, who has a barking and superficial voice, realizes the hostile, paranoid, and oddly principled potential that is latent in his character.

In showing the flowering of Dyar's personality, Bowles writes a first-rate character-based mystery, which examines what happens to a naïve and lonely man who, through circumstance, finds himself with a briefcase of money and the determination "to escape from his cage, to discover the way out of the fly-trap, to strike the chord inside himself which would liberate those qualities capable of transforming him from a victim to a winner."

LET IT COME DOWN is also fully persuasive in its depiction of the parallel European and Muslim communities in Tangier in the period immediately preceding Moroccan independence. Finally, this novel has the most amazing renderings of kif (pot) and majoun (hashish) usage that I have read anywhere.

An outstanding novel and highly recommended.

Casablanca Without the War
My fellow reviewers got a lot more out of this novel than I did, which suggests that the fault may lie with me. I just don't get it, but then again I didn't get "A Passage to India" either. The smart set vs the low lives is not a favorite topic of mine, it has to be said. I found the piece dated and dull; as social writing it uncovers a world that we assume has vanished. This is colonial expat life, when the going was good. The last generation that could travel trailed by servants, all brown, black or yellow who worked for so little even a broke American file clerk could afford to take on a few. (No wonder Paul and Jane loved it all so much.) The writing captures the chatter between the royals and the commoners, this being very much a novel of an innocent American caught up in upper-case corruption set in the Third World. Many will find this exotic; no doubt Bowles made this his territory and held court in Morocco for years along side the Woolworth's heiress. Bowles himself missed the times when whites were no longer welcome in North Africa, missed the Arab rejection of the Euro-American colonialists. I found the book dull, the people in it dull, the author's insights dull. His world is much more that of Cannes or Malibu than Africa; it is a world of the celebrity rich playing among the little brown people, a colonial aristocracy of the rich, playing at life, playing with people. This may be Bowles' insight and his critique, but I have never felt that there is much of a critique of colonialism to be found in Bowles. What I know of his life suggests to me that he found a niche and exploited it to the hilt. And according to him, there is only one response to life, "it is written."

Oh go ahead, let it...
Something's going to happen, Dyar can just feel it. He doesn't know what, he doesn't know when, but until it does his life can't truly begin, and it needs to begin pretty soon, because he's already 30 and although it's not too late yet, it's getting there.

Dyar is an American who's come to Tangier to escape life behind a cage as a bank teller. But from the moment he arrives in this most exotic of cities, he get himself in over his head with the expatriates of the International Zone where, in the famous words of Hassan I Sabbah, "nothing is true and everything is permitted--sort of, if you know the rules of the game.

The problem for Dyar is that he doesn't know the rules. As a result, he ends up making all the wrong moves and becomes the pawn of all the other players: a local prostitute, a group of currency smugglers, a Russian spy, the bored wife of an exiled Spanish aristocrat. With incredible speed and ineptitude Dyar sets himself up for the fall, which is all the more tragic inasmuch as he's obsessed with the idea of not being numbered among life's victims.

Yet his lack of experience, his naiveté, his basic immaturity virtually guarantee that he'll end up victimized.

"Let It Come Down" bears a striking resemblance to Camus' "The Stranger," but in my opinion, Bowles' novel is a good deal more powerful a treatment of a similar theme. Dyar is trying desperately to convince himself of the reality of his existence, and as his desperation increases and his failures accumulate, he commits one last horrendous act meant to define himself once and for all. The hashish-inspired series of revelations that he undergoes towards the end of the novel and the shocking culmination of violence that serves as the capstone to "Let It Come Down" will not be easily forgotten.

Bowles is a wonderful prose stylist--clear and readable and yet philosophically sophisticated in a way one doesn't ordinarily expect in American novelists. He is, for instance, far deeper and more complex a writer than Hemingway, with whom he's sometimes compared. It's an unfair comparison, in any event, for Bowles' is, in my view, a far superior writer in every regard.

A book and an author well-worth discovering, or rediscovering, one can't go wrong with Paul Bowles' "Let It Come Down"--both are greatly underestimated and under-read. Its quite likely that will change as a retrospective examination of 20th century American literature is made in the not-so-distant future.

Europeans and Arabs.

Paul Bowles had already established himself as an American composer when, at the age of 38, he published 'The Sheltering Sky' andbecame one of the most powerful writers after world war two.By the time of his death in 1999 he had become a legendary writer. From his base in Tangier he produced novels, stories, and travel writings. Bowles describes collisions between 'civilized' exiles and unfamiliar societies. In fiction of slowly growing menace, he achieves effects of horror and dislocation.

In 'Let It Come Down' ( 1952 ), Bowles tells the doomed trajectory of Nelson Dyer, a New York bank teller who comes to Tangier in search ofa different life and ends up giving in to his darkest impulses. Rich in descriptions of the corruption and decadence of the International Zone in the last days before Moroccan independence, Bowles second novel is a comic and at the same time horror-like account of a descent into the pool of nihilism.

I give 4 stars because Bowles' philosophy is sometimes oversimplified and the comical can be childish. For instance one of the characters slips over a little heap of dung and he falls to the ground. But altogether this book is interesting for its mixture of adventure and vivid descriptions of Tangier and the surrounding landscapes. ... Read more

Product Description
Paul Bowles had already established himself as an important composer when at age 39 he published The Sheltering Sky and became recognized as one of the most powerful writers of the postwar period. From his base in Tangier he produced globally ranging novels, stories, and travel writings that set exquisite surfaces over violent undercurrents. His elegantly spare novels chart the unpredictable collisions between "civilized" exiles and a Morocco they never grasp, achieving effects of extreme horror and dislocation.

This Library of America Bowles set, the first annotated edition, offers the full range of his achievement: the portrait of an outsider who was one of the essential American writers of the last century. In addition to his novels-The Sheltering Sky (1949), Let It Come Down (1952), The Spider's House (1955), Up Above the World (1966)-and his collected stories-including such classics as "A Distant Episode" and "Pages from Cold Point"-they contain his masterpiece of travel writing, Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue (1963). Throughout, Bowles shows himself a master of gothic terror and a diabolically funny observer of manners as well as a prescient guide to everything from the roots of Islamist politics to the world of Moghrebi music. With a hallucinatory clarity as dry and unforgiving as the desert air, Bowles sends his characters toward encounters with unknown and terrifying forces both outside them and within them. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Brilliant work from a first-rate story-teller
As I write this I'm listening to King Crimson's classic instrumental "The Sheltering Sky," which is as mesmerizing as Paul Bowles' novel of the same name. What I love about Bowles fiction (particularly his short stories, but these novels are fine, too) is how simply told it is. The prose is uncluttered and the plots very straight forward. Yet, what happens to his characters is often horrible or horrific. As Tobias Wolff wrote, "they move with the inevitability of myth." Also, despite the fact that they were written decades ago, they're still relevant today, because they typically depict Americans traveling in the Muslim world, totally taking it for granted and ultimately paying the price. Prescient stuff.

places in time to be visited, faces to forget, words to understand, silences to be studied
Once more after finishing "Let It Come Down" by Paul Bowles I have become aware that some people are doomed to self-destruction and they rush there from their unhappiness and loneliness, from inability to adapt the surrounding reality, from consuming inside emptiness which tells them keep going from there. There is no escape from this horror of existence " a certain day, at a certain moment, the house would crumble and nothing would be left but dust and rubble, indistinguishable from the talus of gravel that lay below the cliffs. It would be absolutely silent, the falling of the house, like a film that goes on running after the sound apparatus has broken." Together with us the time will slowly dissolve falling to pieces and nobody would care that once " there were places in time to be visited, faces to forget, words to understand, silences to be studied", only the inhuman night will remain.
I am not horrified with the end of the novel, I knew I was reading Paul Bowles, I am not disgusted with the protagonist Dyar, I only feel pity for him and experience an immense fear of a fragile human soul that may break any moment searching for its place, "a definite status, a precise relationship with the rest of men" in a hostile world that we are responsible for creating ourselves.
I am amazed how through all the novel, the rain deciphers the coming events: it pours, rains heavily or calmly, it can rain indifferently or dip in a desultory fashion, it rains lightly bringing hope with a soft sound of falling, it offers watery sky, wet gray colorless twilight and in the end of the novel it produces the dead flat sound spreading around. The same is with the wind which blows from all the directions changing from a sweet breeze to a wind which carries the paralyzing promise of winter or a strong malevolent evil clattering the door.
I think I have learnt one simple truth from Paul Bowles: the dreamers can't be happy, you must have simple daily achievable goals to feel content just to be alive on a fine sunny morning, however, one thing is to realize it, quite another to try to turn your thoughts off.

Bowles takes you on a trip to Morocco
I am captivated by the observations and writing style of Bowles that both brings me into his characters and the settings of Morroco.I was also prepared for my trip to Morroco (where i am writing this from) in the sense of cultural moods and a a few phrases.I have a feeling that his writing seeped something of Morroco into me that gave me some of the confidence I needed as an american in this foreign world.

A Great Value!
You can read the other detailed reviews, all earning 5 stars, and see why this item is ranked so highly.Three novels all in one nice, hardbound, 900+ pages volume, at a great price.I already had all three in paperback, and still ordered this book.If you love Paul Bowles as I do, or are just beginning to read his work, this is the book to buy.

Interesting, Interesting, Interesting
This is my first exposure to the writings of Paul Bowles. What a surprise! The three novels in this edition were written in the late 1940’s to mid 1950’s. His characters are not at all dated. His writing is clear, and uncluttered. In contrasted to his writing style, are his characters who complex, murky and often compelling. I read straight through from the Sheltering Sky to Let It Come Down to The Spider’s House. He is one of the most interesting 20th century American writers. The Library of America has done a wonderful service to readers by ensuring that Paul Bowles will remain in print.

The Sheltering Sky, the first of three novels in this edition, is short, only 250 pages long. It seems to be considered his defining novel. It is about a married couple, Kit, and Port, and their sojourn into the Sahara Desert. They are dishonest with each other about many things, their shaky marriage, and the danger of the trip they have embarked on, fidelity. They cannot take charge of anything, their lives, their marriage, their trip, and even their privacy. The decisions that they make exude with bad judgement. This is exposed early on, when Porter goes off for a walk alone the city. He encounters a stranger, Smail; Port walks off with this stranger, out of the city into the desert to meet and be entertained by a young girl, who he is told is “not a [prostitute] but will want to be paid. The characters do dangerous things.You sense their doom with them. And, like them, the reader is compelled to go on. I do not want to give too many plot details as it might spoil the pleasure of reading what I think is an overlooked 20th century classic.

Let It Come Down,is about a bank clerk seeking adventure in Tangier.Like the Sheltering Sky, there is no happy ending here. You can sense the impending doom of the main character as he makes one bad decision after another. He gets involved with a local prostitute, financial intrigue, and in the end, drugs.

The Spider’s House starts with a quote from the Thousand and One Nights“To my way of thinking, there is nothing more delightful than to be a stranger. And so I mingle with human beings because they are not of my kind, and precisely in order to be a stranger among them.” In the wake of the worldwide effects of militant Islamism, this is a fascinating book to read.

The characters include two Americans. The first, Stenham, sees the French colonial rule in Morocco as destructive. He becomes attracted to Islam. The second is arrogant and contemptuous of the locals, the country, just about everything Moroccan. Each is stranger. Each sees and judges the Moroccan people, their culture, and their religion through western eyes. And so, Bowles introduces Amar, a teenage Moroccan boy, who is a direct descendent of the prophet, Mohammed. The boy is illiterate and poor, but not ignorant.The view of the world that each maintains at the beginning of the novel cannot hold. Set in a time of rebellion, there is plenty of plot to keep the characters moving along.

I highly recommend these three novels. This hard cover edition is published by the Library of America. It is the one that you will want to buy, and keep as part of your permanent library. ... Read more

Product Description

Set in Fez, Morocco, during that country's 1954 nationalist uprising, The Spider's House is perhaps Paul Bowles's most beautifully subtle novel, richly descriptive of its setting and uncompromising in its characterizations. Exploring once again the dilemma of the outsider in an alien society, and the gap in understanding between cultures—recurrent themes of Paul Bowles's writings—The Spider's House is dramatic, brutally honest, and shockingly relevant to today's political situation in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Customer Reviews (14)

Spiders House review
An easy to read fictional account of Moroccos attempt to free itself from French rule.Paul Bowles is a great writer.

Progress Shmogress
Paul Bowles was on a hot streak in the 1950s, and of the 3 novels he wrote between 1949 and 1955 this last one is my hands-down favorite. With each book Bowles seemed to grow more confident in his knowledge of Morocco, and in the gifted teenager Amar he creates his most complete Arab character to date, giving over more of the story to him than to his American hero, the detached expatriate novelist Stenham. The novel is also exciting for the way Bowles managed to map his longstanding concern with the differences between Islam and the modern West onto the explosive political events in Morocco in 1954, when the Moroccan Independence party was fighting a hot terrorist war against the French (sound familiar?)

Bowles sees the Moroccan rebels and the French occupiers as both destroying a traditional Islamic approach to time that enjoys life for the moment and leaves tomorrow to Allah, an attractive alternative to the Western obsession with logic, causality, and progress that keeps us from seeing the present in our frantic rush to the future. Stenham recognizes his own futility in trying to save the old Morocco he loves, and Bowles is more critical here than in some of his earlier writing of his own position as the privileged outsider. In the end, it made sense to me that Amar is a teenager; it's almost as if Bowles wants to keep his charming Moroccans in a state of perpetual adolescence, forever shielded from Coca-Cola, politics, and the secular pleasures of modernity. At the same time, by taking Moroccans on their own terms, sympathizing with their approach to life rather than trying to change it in the name of progress or democracy, he comes closer than I think Americans will be able to for a long, long time to come to understanding the attractions of a very different, and on its own terms very satisfying, approach to life.

Bowles' subtle "Spider's House."
I read Paul Bowles' SPIDER'S HOUSE (1954) after first reading his earlier novel, LET IT COME DOWN (1952).In both novels, Bowles insightfully examines the subtle culture gap between East and West.He has drawn the title of his novel from the Koran:"The likeness of those who choose other patrons than Allah is as the likeness of the spider when she taketh unto herself a house, and lo! The frailest of all houses is the spider's house, if they but knew," which is also the novel's epigrah.

THE SPIDER'S HOUSE opens in Fez after World War II, just as the French rule in Morocco is about to be challenged by a fierce Nationalist uprising, and the narrative shifts between an American expatriate writer, John Stenham, and an illiterate, Arab youth, Amar.Whereas Stenham, an existentialist, anti-imperialist, is captivated with the aesthetic, "medieval" traditions still alive in the streets of twentieth century Fez--"It did not really matter," to him "whether they worshipped Allah or carburetors," Amar has his own perspective on the use of religion for political gain by Istigal, the Moroccan nationalists movement.It is through the Moslem insights of Amar that Bowles triumphs as a writer.Amar is the real protagonist of the novel. He is something of a stranger in his own culture, with his own understanding of the events unfolding around him, and he believes he has the ability to see into men's hearts. Although Amar's religious faith tells him that the duty of the believer is to fight the unbeliever to the death, when it comes to the use of violence against fellow Moslems for political reasons, he is less certain. Eventually, the paths of Stenham and Amar cross with unexpected results.Now more than fifty years after its publication, without sentimentality, illusions, or blinders, THE SPIDER'S HOUSE remains relevant with its insights into the culture conflicts between East and West.

G. Merritt

The Huckelberry Finn of Islam
I strongly recommend this novel, written in 1954,yet totally alive and relevant to the contemporary reader. I was amazed to see Bowles capture the essence of the clash between the Islamic world view and the Western modern view in such a fresh and insightful manner.

The novel is about the final days of the French occupation of Morocco after World War II. The story is told through the eyes of an American expatriat, Stenham, and then through they eyes of a 15 year old Islamic young man. Stenham, a tired and disappointed writer, has seen the false promise of modernism, and thus is sympathetic to the Moslem determinism and process of living life embedded in faith. Amar, the Moroccan youth, also see those members of the Moroccan nationalists movement, Istiglal, who would use religion for political gain.

The story moves from luxury hotels and modest Moslem homes, to street fights and riots, to Islamic ceremonies high in the Moroccan mountains, to the cafes where Europeans gather to experience a world far different from their own, to the lairs of the subversives who plan to drive the French from Islamic lands.

Like Mark Twain's Huckelberry Finn, the world seen through the eyes of youth allows for fresh observations of the familiarworld. Amar is the Moslem Huckelberry, trying to make sense of Europeans and countrymen in a struggle for power.

Yet it is the cultural interaction between modernism and Islam that Bowles captures perfectly. Bowles paints a realistic, honest, sympathetic vision of the Islamic world. The image reveals the weaknesses and barreness that modernism brings. I recommend this book strongly, especially in these times of conflict between the Western world and the world of Islam.

the struggle between knowledge and wisdom
This is a very moving look at a particular situation but it is also far more. TSH looks at the problem of progress vs the phenomenon of
faith in a way that is both committed and unflinching. As I have come to expect from Bowles, the story is as captivating as it is intelligent. ... Read more

Product Description

The Sheltering Sky is a landmark of twentieth-century literature. In this intensely fascinating story, Paul Bowles examines the ways in which Americans' incomprehension of alien cultures leads to the ultimate destruction of those cultures.

This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.Amazon.com Review
American novelist and short-story writer, poet, translator,classical music composer, and filmscorer Paul Bowles has lived as anexpatriate for more than 40 years in the North African nation ofMorocco, a country that reaches into the vast and inhospitable SaharaDesert. The desert is itself a character in The Sheltering Sky,the most famous of Bowles' books, which is about three young Americansof the postwar generation who go on a walkabout into Northern Africa'sown arid heart of darkness. In the process, the veneer of their lives ispeeled back under the author's psychological inquiry. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (119)

Flawed characters pay the price
I kept asking myself "Why do I like this book?" as I was reading, and never really found an answer-- I just did. The third person omniscient view point was used differently than most novels imbibing it with an anomalous feeling akin to the 1900s north African desert landscape portrayed. The prose wasn't particularly vivid, the plot not entirely engrossing, the author certainly didn't write the characters to be genial. Symbolism abounds, though, and through the machinations of fate's crucible like focus love and regret are finally brought to the forefront.

It brought back the feeling of being a stranger, alone, in 3rd world countries and knowing that with some disputable choices one could easily end up conjoined with these somnolent characters: A left turn here; two rights; a little less common sense; sprinkle in some pride and you've arrived at this story's vertiginous awaking.

Throughout it all you wonder, will they solve their problems before they run out of time? I won't spoil the ending...

Contrived
Pointless, convoluted soul searching by irritating characters who could have sorted their problems with a straightforward chat over a cup of coffee. I can only think that Bowles was exploring what happens when already deranged Americans arrive in a foreign land.
The conversation is contrived. The thought processes near insane in their detachment from reality (were Port and Kit schitzophrenic?). The attempts to make the mundane seem mysterious irritating (the Lyles were just con artists and thieves - that's all).
Certainly Kit's inexplicable behaviour at the death of Port and her subsequent Heart of Darkness like journey into a Saharan erotic mental and physical imprisonment suggests there was a serious mental instability already lurking.
In short, they should have been seeking therapy in New York. They were too unbalanced and immature to take a train to Boston (let alone be married).

Story doesn't engage
It's very difficult to get a read on why any of the characters do what they do.
Kit gettingraped by an Arab father son tag team, and thinking really nothing of it and in fact enjoying it, is bizarre. Sure she was in no position to complain but you'd think she'd be ever on the lookout to escape when she got to their home and town..... but instead her thinking is flaky and flat.She excepts everything as tho she knew no better. As tho her life before never happened. Plus how she got herself into this predicament was unbelievably crazy, she must be the weakest woman in the world.So I'm left to assume she was unstable to begin with. The only real thing we are told about her is that she is a person who is scared of everything, which doesn't jiv with her action of taking off alone into the desert on foot.
I think Bowles was being intentionally shocking to sell his stories.This was published in 1949.Kit's husbands actions were just as incongruous and reckless. And the mom-son team, jeez!, I don't know how they even survived, they belonged in the loony-bin.

Bowles writing is good it's just his story that's not engaging.

fantastic
A wonderful existentialist triumph--and the basis for a song by The Police, "Tea in the Sahara"

The Sheltering Sky
A simple psychological story told in a large setting--the Sahara.The book jacket says it is about psychological terror, but it's really a comprehensive and morbidly interesting look at existentialism.I can't imagine it getting published today or any literary agent fronting it, and mean that more as a criticism of our page-turning culture. I recommend it to readers of literature. ... Read more

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Bowles in altered states
From the preface: "Moroccan kif-smokers like to speak of "two worlds",the one ruled by inexorable natural laws, and the other, the kif world,in which each person perceives "reality" according to his own essence, the state of consciousness in which the elements of the physical universe are automatically rearranged by cannabis to suit the requirements of the individual."-Paul Bowles

Bowles immersion into the culture of North Africa has produced some of the most interesting literature. This scant collection of four stories is an attractive little book of inconsequential but readable tales. Just as Bowles studied and collected Moroccan music as a key into the North African mindset so here he studies kif as another kind of key, one that gives him direct access into the North African subconscious. Bowles sets forth in the introduction that these tales are put together making use of associations made while he was under the kif influence.....the best parts to my ears are the hermetic sayings overheard by kif smokers. "The eye wants to sleep but the head is no mattress", "The earth trembles and the sky is afraid, and the two eyes are not brothers", "A pipe of kif before breakfast gives a man the strength of one hundred camels in the courtyard".
The folk simplicity of these tales is very appealing. Later Bowles will cover this terrain again when he works with Mohammed Mrabet transcripting that Moroccans oral tales. An excellent book by Mrabet/Bowles is M'Hashish(which means full of hashish).Happy happy reading.

A lesser known treasure of the Beat movement
There are two things that set this collection of short stories apart from other Beat movement literature.First, everyone of these stories, regardless of actual plot, includes the use of kif (marijuana).Secondly, this is one of the few true Beat works that is set outside of the American continent.In fact, it is more a collection of folk tales inspired by a merge of Jewish, Moslem, and European cultures.It was not unknown for the Beats to travel to such exotic places as Morocco.William Burroughs did a stint over there.But, the tales told here could have been written by a native, rather than an outsider who was merely visiting.Well worth the read!

Paul Bowles for Beginners
"A pipe of kif before breakfast gives a man the strength of a hundred camels in the courtyard."The proverb which opens this collection of stories lets us know where Bowles is coming from.Four short tales of Moroccan kif smokers open doors into worlds distant in time, space, andspiritual reality from millennial America.Bowles' style is distantlyreminiscent of Hemingway in its bare simplicity, but also evocative of theSouth American magical realists in its exploration of themiraculous.

Each of his heroes is a kif smoker, and each finds it to be auseful and integral part of his life.Whether dealing with difficultneighbors in "A Friend of the World" or avoiding the cops in"He of the Assembly," smokers have a definite edge in Bowles'Morocco.But this is no simple paean--the stupid everyday troubles thatalso spring from kif are presented vividly and humorously (the soldier wholoses his gun in "The Wind at Beni Midar" perfectly captures thezenith and nadir of chronic use).Short but satisfying, "A HundredCamels in the Courtyard" makes an excellent introduction to PaulBowles' work. ... Read more

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fiction, Guatemala, tr Paul Bowles ... Read more

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A surprise of a book
I was looking for contemporary new Latin American writers and found a top 10 list. I had heard of most of those writers but not this one so I bought this book (in English) and it was very well translated (well, it's Paul Bowles after all.) I really enjoyed this short, very short stories from different points of view and I passed this book to some friends to read.

Hopefully a bad translation
Well, I had high hopes for this. The summary on the back sounded very interesting, but it ended up being rather boring. It seemed like the author was trying to write poetry in prose form. The idea was kind of cool, but it really lacked something. Parts of the different descriptions were intriguing, but in the end it left you wondering exactly what happened. I know it was about "True" life in Guatemala, but that's it. Some ideas were worth pondering and I recommend this for a suicidal college poet, but not anyone else.

Magic in Guatemala
"Set in Guatemala, these spare and beautiful tales are linked by themes of magic, violence, and the fragility of existence.Paul Bowles' translation perfectly captures Rey Rosa's stories of the haunted lives of ordinary people in present-day Central America." ... Read more

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A Solid Effort
Bowles is an odd sort. He rose to fame and fortune in an artistic era when it was possible to know only 5 people in New York City and, if they were the right people, make a literary career from them. He literally slept his way to the top, bedding musical and literary celebrities from NYC to Berlin, Hollywood, London and Morocco. Isherwood, we are told, named his famous Sally Bowles after him. He was Aaron Copeland's lover for years. He ran in high artisitc circles, including Gore Vidal, Peggy Guggenheim, and Tennessee Williams. He got most of his commissions from them. His wife, Jane Bowles, ran in even higher circles, bedding grand heiresses, including Woolworth and Reynolds, who bankrolled her theatre productions and pulled strings to see her fiction published. Finally, Jane went off her rocker, jealous, evidently, over her husband's sustained success. Having moved in the gay aristocracy of the 30s, Bowles's attracted the next generation of drug and sex fiends, including Ginsburg and Burroughs, after establishing residence in North Africa. His wife became a rather hopeless alcoholic whose literary production was reduced to a trickleuntil her early death in Spain. Although a success in virtually every artistic endeavor, he seems to have failed to make enough money to retire gracefully. The author tells us that he was reduced to teaching fiction writing in old age, no doubt a rather serious comedown for such a lofty gentlemen, who once traveled first class, and kept a household of servants, sexual and otherwise. One wonders why he ever joined the communist party, given his taste for the high life. One gathers that Bowles lived long enough to see the world change dramatically. It's a story of a closed world. Bowles would write a story, pass it to an old friend, have it published, and then see it reviewed by an old lover. These guys backed each other up. He wrote music for most of Tennessee William's productions, while Tennessee would review Bowles' novels for the NY Times. They traveled with letters of introduction, staying in grand mansions and palaces as house guests. It was indeed a time when the going was good. The biographer herself was once a friend and a patron who provided assistance when Bowles was in need of medical assistance. He has been well-treated by this admiring scholar, who writes well, if not critically. Bowles had what was once known as a charmed life.

A Man Who Crossed Disciplines and Abetted Creativity
Virginia Spencer Carr is not only a fine biographer in this recounting of the life of the ubiquitous Paul Bowles, she also was a friend of a fascinating man who touched many aspects of the arts and made his mark in multiple areas of creation.Some of those areas were in his friendships and interpersonal critiquing of famous artists such as WH Auden, Benjamin Britten, Ned Rorem, Aaron Copland, Tennessee Williams,Virgil Thompson, Carson McCullers, and Gertrude Stein.His life began as a poet, progressed through years as a composer of music that never quite found its place, and ended as a novelist of such impressive books as 'The Sheltering Sky', 'Let It Com Down', 'The Spider's House' etc.

Carr takes all this into account and serves it up with a thorough amount of information about Bowles' carefully guarded private life.Married to lesbian author Jane Bowles, Paul Bowles was one of those sub rosa gay artists who managed to bond with many other great gay artists in a time when such interplay was hardly condoned.Carr manages to give insight as to how these people learned form each other (for instance the infamous February House in New York where many of them lived communally for a while); she does this without resorting to gossip or sensationalism, respecting the fact that writing biography includes an obligation to yield a viable picture of the subject.

Bowles spent much of his life in Tangiers (this is where Carr first met him) and most of his successful novels and writings were influenced by his observations of the clashes between the 'tourists' who visit Morocco yet never connects with the realites and idiosyncrasies of that mysteriously magical place. Much the same could be said about the ambiguous persona of Paul Bowles.How much of his life was due to his inherent talents and how much was due to his integral interplay with the artists of his entourage?Carr poses some fine explanations in this very readable biography of a man who remains an enigma.Grady Harp. July 05

what happened?
this book, we are told, was originally a manuscript of 1,308 pages. i mention this because one comes upon paragraphs here and there that seem part of a longer work. the first chapters are by far the best with the narrative smooth and the early years "fleshed out". however, when bowles' artistic carreer begins so do the problems, which may have to do with the tremendous job of cutting out 3/4 of the original manuscript.
the book contains no new important information or point of view but there are some new details here and there ( mainly about press runs, money matters and sexual partners).
ms. carr travelled 13 times to tangier for her research, arranged for bowles' medical operations in the u.s.a. and had her subject as a house guest for 3 months. however, bowles' literary executor refused to authorize this biography. we are not told why. ... Read more

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On the terrace of an elaborate hilltop apartment overlooking a Central American capital, four people sit making polite conversation. The American couple -- an elderly physician and his young wife -- are tourists. Their host, whom they have just met, is a young man of striking good looks and charm. The girl, his mistress, is very young and very beautiful. Sitting there, watching the sunset, the Slades seem to be enjoying the sort of fortunate chance encounter that travelers cherish. But amid the civilities and small talk, the host's casual remark to the American woman proves prophetic: "It's not exactly what you think."

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A creepy little shocker that just goes to show...
--that a thriller doesn't have to be written at a 6th grade level. Indeed, how much more terrifying it is when executed by a real writer, rather than a bestselling hack.

In his autobiography, Paul Bowles wrote that "Up Above the World" was a bit of a lark, a novel that tried to recapture some of the earliest stories he told himself just for chills. What he's actually accomplished, I think, is something far more significant.

There's something of the quirky darkness of Jim Thompson to this novel--the bad guys are human and fallible; the good guys aren't all that likeable. The moral of the story is murky. When you've finished reading, you're left feeling uneasy.

There's none of the cartoonish butchery that you find in most popular thrillers; but it isn't the graphic description of stabbings, slicings, and disembowelments that really make you want to "turn on a light and lock the doors," as the old jacket cover cliché goes. No, what really gives you the heebie-jeebies is the cold fog of unreason and amorality that exists in the world, the everyday monsters, who are nothing more than screwed-up human beings, and who, by mere chance, we might find our paths have crossed.

Such is the case with Taylor and Day Slade. While on extended vacation abroad in Mesoamerica, they find themselves the "victims" of a hapless if unintentionally obnoxious fellow traveler they cannot seem to shake: a fat woman whom Day made the "mistake" of treating kindly.

From that point on, "Up Above the World" reads like a nightmare--a modern gothic where at every turn the Slades are prevented from doing the one and only sensible thing: run for their lives. By the time they see what's coming, there won't be much time left.

Part mystery, part meditation on evil, "Up Above the World" is not the best of Paul Bowles, but it doesn't have to be. There's enough of what makes Paul Bowles such a spellbinding writer at work here. Tightly written, compulsively readable, and with practically every page steeped in cold dread, this is a novel that isn't done with you even when you're done with it.

Spiders And Flies Caught In A 'Thorny Grove'
Paul Bowles's fourth novel, Up Above The World (1966) is probably the best of his four major novels, all of which are significantly flawed in some way. Bowles was a far better short story writer than a novelist, though he was always an excellent writer of the language regardless of the medium.

Bowles is still best known for his first novel, The Sheltering Sky (1949), though that book is only three-fourths a good novel, being one that sadly degenerates into unintentional parody as it approaches its climax (it's easy to tell exactly where in the narrative Bowles stopped drawing heavily on his own personal experiences in northern Africa: once Kit is imprisoned by the very Arabs who initially appear to be her saviors, the writing takes on clumsy, ersatz tone that wouldn't be out of place in a fourth installment of a 1950s B-movie Tarzan franchise).

Bowles's second novel, the unfocused Let It Come Down (1952), also dealt with troubled expatriates in North Africa, while his third and longest novel, the sprawling The Spider's House, addressed the conflict between Moroccan nationalism and French colonialism.

Thus, it was a good idea for Bowles to minimize the length of Up Above The World, especially since the reader once again finds himself confronted with American citizens awkwardly traveling in foreign lands, a troubled marriage, a mother and son haunted by unresolved incestuous conflicts, brutal non-Americans, existential and nihilistic anxieties, and other fairly shop-worn Bowles motifs.

Up Above The World is the story of elderly Dr. Slade and his much younger wife, Day, who, shortly after their marriage, travel to Central America for pleasure. Neither Dr. Slade or Day wholly embrace what they find on their journey: each constantly complains about the heat, the humidity, the food, the travel arrangements, and the habits, mores, and appearance of the local people, leaving the reader to wonder why the ostensibly intelligent Slades selected Central America as a destination in the first place.

Day befriends a coarse, overweight woman and fellow travelor that Dr. Slade finds entirely repugnant, a woman later killed in a hotel fire after the Slades have departed.

As a result of this brief acquaintanceship, the Slades are unknowingly targeted, stalked, and manipulated by the dead woman's handsome, apparently wealthy son Vero--also known as Grove and Grover throughout the text--and his lower-class sidekick, Thorny.

Once Vero has figuratively seduced the Slades, the plot of Up Above The World weakens considerably. The previously cautious, savvy, and discerning Slades suddenly begin to act carelessly and foolishly, even after both become extremely ill after their first meal at Vero's lavish mountain apartment, and are thus unable to leave or continue their travels.

Shortly afterward, Dr. Slade mysteriously falls sick a second time, and as he is a medical doctor, readers may find it difficult to believe that neither the doctor nor his wife even remotely suspect they have been poisoned, especially when Bowles has made it abundantly clear that this is exactly what has occurred.

Spiders of various kinds and sizes appear continually throughout the novel, thus acting as rather heavy-handed symbols of the kind of sociopathic human beings that Vero and Thorny are in fact. Before the novel's end, it is obvious that, in Bowles's conception, the Slades are flies caught in the web-like 'Thorny Grove' that the obsessive Vero has weaved to entrap them.

Beautifully written but often implausible, Up Above The World nonetheless represents Bowles's greatest achievement in the novel format.

not bad, but not great
Paul Bowles spent a lot of time in Morocco and, I believe, other areas of the Middle East. A long time ago, I read a book of his short stories which were based on indigenous Moroccan myths. The stories were bizarre and hard to fathom, much like what I've encountered of American Indian and other indigenous tales.

When I stumbled across this book (Up Above the World), I recognized the author's name and was curious to see what other kind of writing he had done. It didn't hurt that the back cover touted Bowles as having "undoubtedly one of the finest gifts of all men writing in English" (St. Louis Dispatch). I was somewhat disappointed, though. The book, a tale of murder in a Central American banana republic, contains some masterful passages, but I felt the plot was rather weak. Still, it was an interesting read.

Well short of Sheltering Sky but a good read nonetheless
I leapt upon this book when I saw it at a used bookstore, having been blown away by Bowles' pivotal work, "The Sheltering Sky", which would have to rate as one of the best books I have ever read. I have to say I was underwhelmed by this one - very different in tone and style, not as compulsively readable, but still a good way to pass a few hours on a Sunday afternoon. I do have to give Bowles kudos for his ability to accurately represent some of the seamier consequences that can occur when Americans are placed in unsettling surroundings and act without plan or forethought and his ability to highlight cultural differences in entertaining yet subtle ways. He is definitely a writer whose works I shall continue to seek out.

Darkness in a sunny locale
The first 100 pages of Up Above The World follows the travelings of Taylor and Day two Americans very reminiscent of Port and Kit of Sheltering Sky. In the last 150 pages after meeting a strange couple Taylor and Day are no longer in control of their lives but prisoners of the strange couple. Exactly how this imprisoning takes place and for what reasons only become clear in the very last pages. Only a minimal plot description can be given as the pleasure is in finding things out in the order they are meant to be found out. Having been a longtime fan of Sheltering Sky and all of his stories I hesitated reading any of his other novels as I heard they were not as good as his first. But reading this I find I am reminded not so much of the eerie and desolate majesty of Sheltering Sky which is a far better novel but of Bowles short stories, especially the ones which take place in South America as this novel does.This is not Sheltering Sky caliber fiction but it is a very competent novel and will appeal to those who admire Bowles very modern and often horrific short stories full of deviant psychologies and drugs and all sorts of sordid and often primitive "truths" about human nature. The novel reads like an extended short story really. Occasional details peculiar for being so precise stand out as always in Bowles writing. He describes the sound a cricket makes as coming from the back of its black throat. The Bowles vision is as bleak a vision as exists in serious modern fiction but it is immensely appealing as gothic things often are. I doubt many people really feel the world is as Bowles describes it. He grasps at only one side of human nature, the side the sun never reaches. Not a place you want to live but an intriguing place to travel through. ... Read more

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Exemplary storles that reveal the blzarre, the dlsturblng, the perllous, and the wlse ln other clvlllzatlons -- from one of Amerlca's most lmportant wrlters of the twentleth century.

As Tobias Wolff writes in Esquire, "The Delicate Prey is in fact one of the most profound, beautifully wrought, and haunting collections in our literature.... Bowles's tales are at once austere, witty, violent, and sensuous. They move with the inevitability of myth. His language has a purity of line, a poise and authority entirely its own, capable of instantly modulating from farce to horror without a ruffle." ... Read more

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Post Colonial Blues
DP contains most of Bowles' classic gems, and it provides a good introduction to the kind of thing you will be encountering when you get old enough to take on THE SHELTERING SKY and LET IT COME DOWN.A musician by training, he took on writing as a sort of hobby, then became obssessed with it to the negkect of his music, as he relates in his breezy, atypical memoir WITHOUT STOPPING, written much later in life when he had attained a sort of Buddha-like, or Burroughs-like I don;'t care attitude about the things that had troubled him earlier.When this book first appeared it must have been one tremendous shock after another, and a few of the stories still carry an explosive charge.

One of the best tales seems to be an allegory of Bowles' progress from music to writing.In A DISTANT EPISODE, a professor of music gets abducted by desert bandits who remove his tongue and "train" him into becoming a dancing clown, like a monkey owned by a hurdy-gurdy man.They exhibit him widely, and his brain is so badly damaged that he is content with his retardation, knowing only the blows of his captors, until one afternoon when he accidentally hears some bars of Western music.He starts to cry and bawl his head off, he knows not why.It is a thoroughly repulsive story, but it displays beautifully the ambiguity with which Bowles viewed his long-ago music career, which he must after awhile have remembered only through a thousand veils.

PAGES FROM COLD POINT is pretty stronr too, not to say ripe.In Belize in the Caribbean, a wealthy American gay man comes to stay in a seaside mansion with his 16 year old son, Racky, the apple of his eye.What he doesn't know is that Racky is the bad seed incarnate, like a male Lolita, sex in dungarees.Racky enjoys going to every man and boy on the island, black or white, and seducing them, for he is so lovely no one would say no to him.Eventually the elders and the women decide to put the hammer down and warn the dad to take his slutty boy off the island or trouble will ensue.You won't believe what happens next, but it is worthy of a great porn movie.Radley Metzger might have made you believe it, but for Paul Bowles it was just another day in the life.

Outside Civilizations Walls
"Delicate Prey", the title story, is one of the most memorable stories I've ever encountered. This story of a young flute player and his uncles who are Arab traders crossing a remote desert region begins innocently enough but soon a stranger appears on the horizon who comes closer and closer. This desert episode is told with a perfect accumulation of atmospheric detail and just the barest amount of human detail to place this tale in the realm of myth. The tale involves many things that will later appear in Bowles' other short fictions including hashish and flute music and other things that will go unmentioned so as not to spoil their discovery by new readers. "At Paso Rojo" is a story set in South America on a ranch. There two sisters go after their mothers death to live with their brother. As the sisters settle in one sister especially decides she wants to live a freer life than women in the cities are allowed to live and she begins to allow herself liberties that shock her more conservative sister. As she rides through the wild jungle her horse bolts and the sensations she has impart to the reader that hers is no ordinary psychology. Used to suppressing her sexuality while her mother was alive she begins to explore her power as a woman and as events unfold we see that this power has sprouted something in her that cannot be mistaken for anything but pure evil. Every story in this collection presents striking locales and lurid acts. The appeal of them is partly in the exoticism of the locales and partly in the allure of the lurid. Bowles aesthetic is a strange one but his tales could not be delivered with any more force. The collection is dedicated to Poe, and appropriately so, but the depth of the psychological examination of different kinds of pathologies lend these stories a power thatmagnifies their effect beyond mere horror stories. They are stories of modern psyches with the superficial but protective veneer of civilization removed.

Strange, morbid and fascinating
Not everyone will enjoy thse weird stories mostly set in Mexico or Morocco. They contain violence and, in a way, sex, although sex is never explicitly described. They almost always end in disaster, sometimes grotesque and cruel disaster. The sexual element is never quite straight heterosexual attraction between consenting adults. A frequent plot is that someone is invited somewhere by a host who becomes hostile or takes a journey following an unreliable guide that ends badly. Think DH Lawrence, Joyce Carol Oates, Roald Dahl, Truman Capote and, as regards the prose style. maybe even Raymond Carver He is a minimalist with a way of bringing an exotic setting to life in half a sentence without an adjective or adverb. A remarkable thing is how long ago the stories were written and how modern the style seems.

A Stunning Collection!
This is a must-read for anyone interested in 20th century American literature.An absolutely stunning collection of tales that provoke, disturb and intoxicate the reader.Bowles writes in a style that is almostclinical: dry, precise and elegant, which accentuates the horrors hedescribes all the more.Hailed by such writers and Gore Vidal and NormanMailer as a modern classic, you should not fail to read it if you have notalready done so.And if enjoyed this title, check out The Sheltering Skyand Let it Come Down. ... Read more

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The late "rediscovery" of Bowles...
This book, along with Gore Vidal's incredible introduction, led to a revitalization of the work of Paul Bowles. For far too long most of this work languished in out of print obscurity. But a sentence such as "His short stories are among the best ever written by an American" from the likes of Gore Vidal helped raise eyebrows along with intrigue. New versions of Bowles' work began to appear in the 1980s and eventually led to Bernardo Bertolucci's 1990 film of Bowles' most famous novel, "The Sheltering Sky". Bowles thus had the privilege of being rediscovered late in life (he died in Morocco in 1999 at age 88).

Bowles lived in Morocco for the vast majority of his life. An accomplished composer (trained by Aaron Copland in his youth) and writer, he remained and remains somewhat obscure (or as Vidal puts it "famous among those who were famous"). He writes mostly about non-european cultures, particularly Arabic or Islamic. Many times he said that he wrote from the subconscious; as though he wasn't aware of what he wrote. Some of the stories such as "The Scorpion", "By the Water" (featuring the surreal creature Lazrag), and "You Are Not I" (with its mindboggling midscene character shift) read as though the words did fall from some other dimension. Other stories seem to bear the marks of solid planning, such as "Call at Corazón" (a portrait of a rather unsuccessful marriage unfolding on a South American river), "Under the Sky" ("you are saving your friend's life"), "How Many Midnights" (a surprisingly standard story about a young couple), the nearly epic "The Hours After Noon" (where impressions and reality do not meet), and "Tea on the Mountain" (a very early story). Regardless of how Bowles wrote them, they all share a common undertow of terror of an Edgar Allen Poe style (Bowles once claimed in an interview that his mother read Poe to him before bed(!!!)). Bowles often gets credited for successfully depicting the threads that civilzation hangs on. And the terrors that await beneath the surface.

Some of Bowles' most brilliant creations stem from europeans attempting to infiltrate non-european cultures. "A Distant Episode" tells the disturbing story of a linguist captured by a Moroccan clan who violently turn him into a jester-esque fool. "Pastor Dowe at Tacaté" tells the story of a South American missionary that ends up "bribing" a group of people into hearing scripture by playing the song "Crazy Rhythm" on a victrola. He becomes too successful. In a gesture of thanks the leader of the group offers his very young daughter to the pastor. Which wasn't exactly what the pastor had in mind. The fantastic "The Time of Friendship" depicts the attempts of a German woman to "Christianize" a young Muslim boy. She memorably builds him a crèche. And he memorably doesn't respond to it the way she hopes. Bowles has an uncanny ability to portray the confusion and frustration of clashing cultures without making either side look ridiculous or inferior. When he writes tragic stories about people getting mistreated or misunderstood in other cultures, it never comes across as spiteful or racist. It seems strangely sympathetic regardless of the pain or horrors depicted. "The Delicate Prey" probably stands as the best example of this. It's downright disturbing. And violently sadistic. In such ways, Bowles' fiction actually teaches us about facing other cultures, and the problems and potential terrors that can arise if one "gets lost". Although he also presents a humorous example with the late story "You Have Left Your Lotus Pods on the Bus". Here a westerner spends the day with a group of Thai Buddhist monks ("What is the significance of the necktie?").

This collection presents a great overiew of the bulk of Bowles' short story output. The thick meaty stories of the 1940s gradually give way to the lighter stories of the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1970s many of the stories run only a few pages. But they maintain their intensity. "Allal" ends the book brilliantly with the story of a boy who enters the psychic perspective of a colorful snake. It evokes the same mood as the gorgeous earlier story "The Circular Valley" in which a spirit (an "Atlájala") enters a couple in love and storms off with disgust.

With the possible exception of the four kif-inspiried stories from the 1960s this collection offers up no disappointments. It demonstrates Bowles at his best. Anyone curious about this still rather obscure writer can start with this book. It includes most of Bowles' most acclaimed work. And at the end readers will likely wonder how this innovative storyteller continues to remain in the shadows of obscurity.

Good way to get into bowles
A fabulous collection by one of the better fiction writers from this century.If you are new to Bowles, this is an excellent way to dig in and see and what he is about.East/West cultural differences, bizarremysticism and brutality are some of the main ideas explored here with hischaracteristic almost dead-pan descriptions that are both beautiful andbrutal in their honesty.Learn why he has been cited as one of the bestwriters by everyone from the Beats to Raymond Carver.Set apart from themall in Africa, he still managed to influence all of them in major ways. Open it and enjoy.

A truly great collection
At his best, Bowles is rarely matched as a short story writer (A Distant Episode, The Frozen Fields, Pastor Dowe at Tacate, The Time of Friendship, The Delicate Prey, etc.).Precise, detached prose which often sustains aterrifying and revealing intensity of atmosphere.Any fans of"horror" would love this, though much of the terror is implied,psychological. There's also a few 4-5 pg. hallucinogenic (sp?) pieces whichdon't do much for me.Well worth reading.And reading (have read ADistant Episode three times).

Fantastic Short story collection, direct and poetic
I love the stories of Paul Bowles. One of the few writers which spins a web of magic around his short stories without overdosing in adjectives. The worlds of bowles are often drawn in pure, brutal, indegenious colours, which you can nearly smell and taste when you read them. Many stories of him play in morocco (or south america), and if you want to learn something of these exciting countries and the culture, this is one of the best sources. It shows how much we can try to feel at home at foreign places and yet seldom succeed. Always in our head,ethoncentristic with friendship as the only real link to the other world. Bowles stories often leave me breathless at the end. They build up so much hope, so much plasticity and leave you nothing when you turn the last page. But even if the aftertaste seems to be a bitter one, you get enchanted, you read the next story, you want more. Then something after ten or fifteen books you can't wait to take the next plane to Africa... In some sense Bowles can be related to the Beat literature. The only thing is that Bowles didn't move on. He stayed in Tanger and his view of the world got much sharper than the one of the other beats. His protagonists still like to travel, they are searching for something, but what they find is beyond their dreams. It is naked realism and so strong that the mind begins to spin...(Look for P.B - Let it come down)LIGHT A CANDLE, READ A SHORT STORY OF THIS MARVELOUS COLLECTION AND WATCH FOR RESULTS...

If the short story "garden" will not enchanten you you probably are in desperate need of some of that moroccon majoun.

D.Mehring ... Read more

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Capitalism has proved itself to be the most enduring economic system of our time. This book explores whether capitalism will destroy us or liberate us.

Customer Reviews (3)

Life in a Poor Dusty World
A beautiful, spare story that illuminates life in a very poor culture.It's not often that we get to see, from street level, an exotic world that hasn't been scrubbed clean and fancified for the mindless tourist.I suspect the impact of the story is due as much to Bowles's translation as the storyteller himself.It was a little disappointing to learn that the author, Driss Ben Hamed Charhadi, later moved to the United States.

A timeless masterpiece of storytelling
Paul Bowles first began translating the stories of contemporary native Moroccans in 1952, transcribing by hand the tales of Ahmed Yacoubi, several of which appeared in Evergreen Review. In the early 1960's, with the aid of a tape recorder, Bowles decided to pursue the preservation of Maghrebi oral literature. This decision was prompted in part by Bowles' acquaintance with Larbi Layachi, a young Moroccan who was working as a watchman at a café at nearby Merkala Beach. Layachi, although illiterate and not a "storyteller" in the true Arabic tradition, proved to be a master of the tautly spun narrative, and his story, obviously nothing more than thinly veiled autobiography, is told with the same stark, unembellished point of view that formed the basis of the Italian neo-realist cinema, yet virtually without pathos, sentimentality or moralizing of any sort. Basically left to fend for himself at the age of eight, Layachi works a series of jobs as shepherd, baker's helper, laborer, watchman, houseboy to a "Nazarene" gay couple, and as a petty trafficker in kif in the rough-and-tumble streets of Tangier at the cusp of post-colonialism, eventually winding up in jail, sentenced to hard labor in a rock quarry. Adversity raises its Medusa-like head on every other page, in the form of betrayal, denunciation, false accusations, uninformed decisions, corruption, or just plain bad luck, of which Layachi obviously had a very generous helping.
Whereas the typical westerner might have difficulty supporting Layachi's dogged fatalism in the face of constant defeat, failure, frustration and setbacks, the majority of which do seem to be of an unjust nature (despite Layachi's at times pathological tendency to blur the parameters of right and wrong), it's Layachi's very determination to go on no matter what that gives A Life Full of Holes its extremely positive and life-confirming slant. To survive such an uncompromisingly negative chain of events without becoming a burned-out, apathetic nihilist is a true test of faith. And while the Koran is frequently cited to explain or justify particularly heavy blows of fate or irrational human behavior ("It's the will of Allah," etc.), it's also Layachi's ironic and cynical sense of humor that serves as a buffer between himself and life's harder edges and as a comic foil against the perpetrators of ill will. Compellingly told and packed with detail, Layachi's story of survival is also one of simple poetry.

loathe to give anything five stars, i couldn't help myself
here. it's simply a great book, in the introduction i believe paul bowles mentions that a great narrator keeps his narrative thread equally taut at all times and this is precisely what the authour has done. the book is a compelling view of a life in a part of the world that differs wildly from where i was born, told with a coolness that should not be mistaken for detachment. it's a rewarding read and it hleps when trying to put things in perspective. ... Read more

Product Description

In this intense and brilliant book Bowles focuses on Morocco, condensing expreience, emotion, and the whole history of a people into a series of short, insightful vignettes. He distills for us the very essence of Moroccan culture. With extraordinary immediacy, he takes the reader on a journey through the Moroccan centuries, pausing at points along the way to create resonant images of the country, it's landscapes, and the beliefs and characteristics of its inhabitants.

Customer Reviews (3)

Polaroids of ancient contacts with Moghrebi culture
Fairly well titled, the book collects small stories and parts of history to form a Polaroid like impression on the relationship between western European Christians and north African Muslims in a Moroccan landscape. One of the many charms of Points in Time is exactly the lack of a frame, of a recognizable structure. Even handling with concrete and logical situations, the narrative of non connected events in similar backgrounds has onirical qualities and resembles Bowles experiments with non-conscious writing seen in A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard. For those unfamiliar with Bowles it is perhaps not the best book to begin with; it would be like starting a seven course meal by the desserts.

A stylized history of Morocco...
At first glance, "Points In Time" looks like another Bowlesian short story collection or experimental novel. Everything present in his work manifests itself here: lush, vivid descriptions, misunderstandings that lead to horrible deaths, and Moroccan culture. Nonetheless, the format diverges slightly from Bowles' other work. Here, 11 sections ranging from single paragraphs to short stories relate a seemingly disconnected narrative. Those not familiar with Moroccan history will nonetheless see a theme emerge. Those familiar with it will know that "Points in Time" represents more than a collection of random tales: it tells the story of Morocco in the form of experimental fiction. Is this book "historical fiction?" In some ways. But regardless of how one categorizes this tiny work, it fits in perfectly with the rest of Bowles' writings.

The key to the book's structure appears in the "notes and sources" section. Hanno the Carthaginian (or "the Navigator") appears in the first note. His "Periplus" contains 4th century accounts of sites in northern Africa. The elliptical first section of "Points in Time" was apparently inspired by this ancient source. According to the notes and subsequent interviews, the stories within originate with actual historical accounts. Bowles apparently made nothing up, but he rewrote the tales in his own style. This gives some of the stories a more sinister and grisly aura. Section II tells the curious story of Fra Andrea, who studies the scriptures a little too well. He pays a rather painful price for his "freethinking." Section VI relates a Romeo and Juliet-esque story of a beautiful young Jewish woman's elopement with a Muslim. She meets a tragic end similar to Fra Andrea's. The Spanish enter the story, via an intriguing tale involving a stag that attacks a bridegroom, and the French inevitably follow. Gradually the stories suggest that no entity that ruled or conquered Morocco possessed a monopoly on brutality. Section VIII contains amusing 1950s Moroccan pop song lyrics. They express, probably better than any prose could, some of the cultural conflicts that resulted when Americans arrived in droves. The final section, XI, consists of a single descriptive paragraph, which stylistically echoes section I. Throughout, the writing remains riveting.

"Points in Time" appeared in 1982. Bowles would write only one more collection of stories, "Unwelcome Words," and a 1991 novella, "Too Far From Home," before passing away in 1999. His work stands on the brink of two cultures now in conflict. Many have suggested that westerners could learn from Bowles' observations of Moroccan and Islamic society. Nonetheless, his work seems strangely forgotten in such contexts. But whatever political merit Bowles' work contains - he likely would have said it has none - the experience of reading Bowles' best work remains a unique experience, particularly amongst American writers. Readers looking for a good introduction to this expatriate writer will find an enjoyable and effortless one in "Points in Time."

Bowled Over
A short novel of stunning concision -- liberating his work from the millstone of fixed character POV or time, Bowles jumps between vastly different ages (while maintaining his chosen setting: North Africa) with breathtaking fluency and a near- total disregard for realist conventions.This short novel, acclaimed by manyas a masterpiece, ought to haveinspired a revolution in storytelling: it is as explosive, in its own way,as Breton's *Nadja*. Instead, it simply sank from view. Some of thesections are only as long as a paragraph; others are bona fide shortstories. But what endures in the mind is the way that Bowles' writingshifts, as if by magic, into the most voluptuous shapes. ... Read more

Product Description

A Distant Episode contains the best of Paul Bowles's short stories, as selected by the author. An American cult figure, Bowles has fascinated such disparate talents as Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Truman Capote, William S. Burroughs, Gore Vidal, and Jay McInerney.

Bowles'sdelivery--deadpan, without affectation, hyperbole, or discourse--setsup a disconcerting and delicious tension. Fate, in each story, isallowed to play itself out with no authorial summing-up, nointerjection against the intractable landscape. Remember that Bowlescountry acknowledges a debt to the sensibilities of such literarypeers as AllenGinsberg, William S.Burroughs, and Jay McInerney.Don't look for meaning in the obvious places. Let it emerge likeinsights and connections made from the stuff of the subconscious.Regardless, this collection offers the good old-fashioned experienceof excellent fiction--from a writer who will blow your assumptionsabout the world wide open. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Powerful stories from another world
I first came across this book while reading Francine Prose's "Reading Like a Writer." She provided a short excerpt from "A Distant Episode" and I was intrigued.

That particular story - the first in this collection selected by Bowles - was perhaps the most arresting, but they were all interesting. Each story quickly draws you into an exotic world with characters and settings that are palpable.

Perhaps I was most taken in by how different each of the stories seemed to be. From a horrifying, violent descent into obscurity and insanity to a simple collection of letters by a single author. From compact, intense stories to a meandering walk through the life of an older, single woman in a foreign place.

These images have stayed with me long after I put the book down.

Tales of Those Away From Home
Bowles likes to place his characters in situations where all the usual comforts have been removed. So his locations are remote ones. South America and North Africa are two of his favorite.The characters in these stories are usually sensitive types and so are already fragile and impressionble but in the unusual settings those characterictics are even more evident and make them especially vulnerable. Bowles characters are travelers set against native cultures and in such conditions the traveler is always at a disadvantage because he has left behind those things which have served to stabilize his life. The traveler is merelyadrift in the world, while the natives of the visited region have remained rooted to a very old culture. America itself is a very young culture, a colonial culture, and the authors that Bowles admired were those early colonial writers like Poe. Bowles in a way continues with Poe's themes of Americans lost in the untamed wilderness of themselves. But also in Bowles writing one can feel the influence of writers he was contemporary with like Camus, who also experienced colonialism as he was raised in North Africa under French rule. There is violence in Bowles work of many kinds but always along with the violence is some discovery about either an individual or about the nature of the world in general or both as the violent act often serves to strip away a characters long held illusions which kept a certain version of the world in place and reveal a more primitive more vital world beneath. The stories by and large take place in the mind of the traveling westerner, though one story is told through the eyes of an Arab. You can get a complete collection of Bowles stories for about twice the price but this collection contains all the stories he is known for including the title story and Delicate Prey, his two most famous.But there are at least a dozen stories here which once read will never be forgotten.

A Lost, WondrousHollowness
Paul Bowles will go down as the only writer of the soi-disant "Beat" generation worth a look at.In my opinion, of course, he ALREADY is the only one of them with a mote of talent.And what a talent it is!!-His style is original and inimitable.His writings convey a feeling totally unlike any other writer's....But what is it?The paradox is that since it's so original and unlike anything else, it's difficult to find words and comparisons to convey to the would-be reader why to buy this book.Almost all the reviews aver that Bowles' characters are defined by place.This is eminently the case.In fact, one might say that his characters are SO defined by place that they aren't really "characters" at all, but mere functions of the universes they find themselves in (rather harsh and bleak ones, to understate things a bit). -Reading these stories, you actually begin to lose a sense of self: YOUR self.That's how powerful Bowles' writing is.What you are left with is, of course, a hollowness, on the one hand, in finding that you have lost your sense of identity.But you have gained something: a lost wonder, beautiful and terrifying, of what existence, after all, is, that captures something of what a child feels at times.But the comparison with a child's view is to simplify things enormously.What you really gain, to put things perhaps a bit awkwardly, is the terror and wonder of being alive.The Greeks had a word for this feeling, Deinos.We don't have such a word, a word that so effectively combines the feelings of terror and wonder. - It's where we get the word dinosaur from, if that helps any.-But this may be beside the point.Just read the book...and...you'll see...

Walking into the dark, sinister desert of perverse fantasy.
Reading these stories, set in North Africa where Bowles lived, is likelike roaming some lonely alien landscape while being helplessly asaulted byfeelings of dread, wonder, strangeness, and beauty. Lacking muchdescriptive prose,these stories are naked, simple, raw. Gradualy the selfdissolves, the character's behaivor is so defined by their enviroment thatthey become part of it . The reader, too, melts into the background. Eastand west colide violently, explode ; and nothing remains but the starkterror and magic of life. Own of Bowles best. A must forWilliam Burroughsfans too.

Walking into the dark, sinister desert of perverse fantasy.
Reading these stories, set in North Africa where Bowles lived, is likelike roaming some lonely alien landscape while being helplessly asaulted byfeelings of dread, wonder, strangeness, and beauty. Lacking muchdescriptive prose,these stories are naked, simple, raw. Gradualy the selfdissolves, the character's behaivor is so defined by their enviroment thatthey becme part of it . The reader, too, melts into the background. Eastand west colide violently, explode ; and nothing remains but the starkterror and magic of life. Own of Bowles best. A must forWilliam Burroughsfans too. ... Read more

Product Description

Paul Bowles, the acclalmed author of The Shelterlng Sky, offers movlng, powerful, subtle, and fasclnatlng lnslghts lnto hls llfe, hls wrltlng, and hls world.

Customer Reviews (3)

A life lived like there's no tomorrow (or yesterday)...
Had Paul Bowles died when he was thirty, he still would have lived three times more life than 98% of us ever live. This autobiography is a chronicle of only the first fifty-odd years of a life that went on for another three decades. So much happens in *Without Stopping* that Bowles can no more afford to dwell too long on any one episode in the telling of his life than he seemed to dwell in the living of it. He's on his way to somewhere else on virtually every page, meeting someone new in practically every paragraph.

This is the story of a man who basically lived as if the seat of his pants were on fire. The list of people whose paths he crossed, who he sought out or was sought out by, read like a "Who's Who" of the most important cultural figures of the 20th century. His travels took him to many of the most exotic locales on earth.Bowles, as his title aptly emblemizes, truly seemed to never stop. Life as he lived it was the exercise of a boundless curiosity that fed an equally boundless capacity for creative endeavor.

The amazing thing is that he started out so unprepossessingly as the son of a suburban dentist in Queens, New York. His father was a super-critical, psychologically abusive, control-freak. Yet Bowles, still only in his early twenties when he ran off to Paris, had the chutzpah to call on no less an imposing a personage as Gertrude Stein! At that age, I was too intimidated to call Dominoes on the phone and have a pizza delivered.

Really, if there's one bad thing about this book, it's that it makes you feel like you've wasted your life, that you've lived a timid, if safe, mouse-life forever cowering under a sheltering sky. When death comes, as it must, you'll regret leaving so much of the world behind. A man like Bowles could truly say goodbye to himself and life--as he highlights in the epigram from Valery at the end of *Without Stopping*--because he so thoroughly used up both. For such a man, death, when it comes, is more than anything else, the embarking point towards a new adventure.

Those who've read Bowles' fiction will recognize in this autobiography many of the real-life events that served as the foundation from which he eventually built up and crafted his stories and novels. In fact, *Without Stopping* itself often reads like fiction and not because it doesn't ring true, but because it is just so stupendous that any one man could have lived such a totally connected life at the very center of the cultural matrix of his time.

If you enjoy the work of Paul Bowles, *Without Stopping* is a must-read.But the book can be read with profit and pleasure by those who don't know Bowles as well--indeed, it is a distillation of everything Bowles ever wrote. For anyone with a heart in their chest, a brain in their head, and a committed interest in life and art, *Without Stopping* is both goad and inspiration--it is an unreserved, if unsentimental celebration of the dark and the light, of the act of breathing while one can, and getting the most out of oneself and one's world while the getting is good. And even when it's not so good.

Inspiring story, even if you don't know about Bowles
Reading books like this makes me wonder why I have a day job. Bowles weaves an intricate yet breakneck-speed bio of his life, starting with childhood and racing to his life in Tangiers in the early 70's. The biggest shock to me was the amount of work this guy got done. He was writing ballets, scores, soundtracks, books, poetry, newspapers, pamphlets, and orchestra pieces almost nonstop. Even as a kid, he'd write pages and pages a day, and later, he'd type for hours without stopping, hence the title of the book. His travels are also amazing; in an age with little air travel he zips to France, Morocco, India, Panama, Cuba, the Bahamas, all over the US, and dozens of other places too numerous to count. Plus he's met and had long friendships with scores of famous people: Salvador Dali, Bela Bartok, Aaron Copeland, Gertrude Stein, Arthur C. Clarke, Bill Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Tennessee Williams, and many others. The book is thick and takes time to crawl through, but every time I set it down, I wanted to either start writing a book or a play or take off for a distant region. My only complaint is that sometimes Bowles like to insert a random line of French or Spanish, which annoys me because I know either. And he tends to drop names rapidly, making you wish you had a score card or a flowchart or something. But Bowles is definitely an interesting guy, and his life story is worth reading.

A must-read for insight into Bowles' other writing.
Well worth reading if you're a fan of Bowles. Slow and mysteriously vaporous, like much of his fiction. Full of subtle insights (both intended and unintended) into his mind and his writing. ... Read more