Paul Bowles is a man and author of exceptional latitude but he has, like nearly all serious artists, a dominant theme. That theme is the fearful isolation of the individual being. (p. 19) Certainly a terrible kind of loneliness is expressed in ["The Delicate Prey and Other Stories"] …, but the isolated beings in these stories have deliberately chosen their isolation in most cases, not merely accepted and endured it. There is a singular lack of human give-and-take, of true emotional reci...
[Although] the meticulously described landscape changes [in The Collected Stories], the situation of Bowles' heroes remains the same. The hero is usually a displaced person; he is suddenly, often brutally compelled to see the "heart of darkness." He is abused, violated, transformed. But Bowles refuses to allow him more than a few seconds of understanding; his broken hero disappears under "the sheItering sky."
In one of his poems, D. H. Lawrence speaks of a creature whose origin predates not only man, but God—a creature born "before God was love"—and it is precisely this sense of a natural world predating and excluding consciousness that Paul Bowles dramatizes so powerfully in [his "Collected Stories"]. It is no accident that the doomed professor (of linguistics) in the story "A Distant Episode" loses his tongue before he loses his mind and his humanity ...
Paul Bowles stages his impressive novels in a climate of violence and pervading sentient awareness. The atmosphere in which his characters move and have their being is arid and parched, nourished by no springs of feeling or sentiment, relentless and neutral as the shifting yet ineluctable sands always just beyond the city. The impact of this experience on a disintegrating Western mind has served as subject for Bowles' very special fiction…. Now with [Let It Come Down], Bowles has again set out...
[Bowles's Collected Stories is] often brutal, sometimes night-marish, full of sudden inexplicable violences. They present an unsettling mixture of linguistic austerity and exotic settings. Many of the tales are located in North Africa or Mexico, places Bowles knew well, but likely to be unfamiliar to Americans, and therefore both intriguing and discomforting. These are not easy reading, but they are compelling. Unflinchingly honest, they illuminate life's uncertainties and terrors. The most te...
There is nothing obscure or surrealist in "Let It Come Down"; the writing is always perfectly lucid, the author always completely in control. Bowles is writing in a well-defined romantic—decadent mode with such a sharp reportorial eye for current realities that his story is fully engaging so long as we can keep from thinking about its philosophic intentions or about the character of the hero. The metaphysical and imaginative dimensions of the pathological visions are impressive as creat...
["Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue" is] a collection of nine essays on journeys to remote areas of the Hindu, Mohammedan and Buddhist worlds with an excursion to Central America. It combines a superb gift for observation with an almost complete lack of the capacity to deal with it once it is made. The second step, as it were, is missing, and we would resign ourselves to this deficiency with a better grace if the preliminary processes were not so excellent. The vision is there; th...
Paul Bowles knows the Arab world and seemingly understands it as very few "foreigners" have. "The Spider's House" is his fourth work of fiction and unquestionably his best. It is alive with the drama of a few tension-filled days in present-day Fez, its action culminating in open warfare between the French and the Moslems. The novel is primarily one of character and idea. It is a delineation of good and evil, centering on the contrasting personalities of a fortyish American...
There are nine stories in [Things Gone and Things Still Here], all but one set in North Africa …, characterized generally by a modest narrative style, rather dry and not inappropriate to the settings. In place of splashy prose and technical nuance, Bowles relies most often on the quality of Moroccan life to carry the story forward. That life is one of villages and tribes, of beggars and servants and holy men, of cafes and kif (hemp) and snake charmers. The impulse behind most stories seems to be a so...
