A Distant Episode

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.

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 merely adrift 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.

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...

Reading these stories, set in North Africa where Bowles lived, is like like roaming some lonely alien landscape while being helplessly asaulted by feelings of dread, wonder, strangeness, and beauty. Lacking much descriptive prose,these stories are naked, simple, raw. Gradualy the self dissolves, the character's behaivor is so defined by their enviroment that they become part of it . The reader, too, melts into the background. East and west colide violently, explode ; and nothing remains but the stark terror and magic of life. Own of Bowles best. A must forWilliam Burroughs fans too.

Reading these stories, set in North Africa where Bowles lived, is like like roaming some lonely alien landscape while being helplessly asaulted by feelings of dread, wonder, strangeness, and beauty. Lacking much descriptive prose,these stories are naked, simple, raw. Gradualy the self dissolves, the character's behaivor is so defined by their enviroment that they becme part of it . The reader, too, melts into the background. East and west colide violently, explode ; and nothing remains but the stark terror and magic of life. Own of Bowles best. A must forWilliam Burroughs fans too.