The Delicate Prey

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.

"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 that magnifies their effect beyond mere horror stories. They are stories of modern psyches with the superficial but protective veneer of civilization removed.

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.

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 almost clinical: dry, precise and elegant, which accentuates the horrors he describes all the more. Hailed by such writers and Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer as a modern classic, you should not fail to read it if you have not already done so. And if enjoyed this title, check out The Sheltering Sky and Let it Come Down.