The Stories of Paul Bowles

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.

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.

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!

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.

There are many reasons to read Paul Bowles. One is for the strange atmospheres he describes, another is for the fragile, delicate and easily dissembled egos of his protaganists. A typical Bowles story introduces you to all of these elements at once, one playing or preying on the other. In these stories we see the unraveling of identity after identity and the impression that builds as one moves from one story to another is that there is nothing that can save this from happening to the unprotected or unsheltered westerner whose identity structure disintegrates so easily when divorced from the western setting it is so reliant on. This pattern is also evident in his famous novel Sheltering Sky, a document of one man seeking dissolution in the desert, the fact that he is with a wife and a friend only underline his inability to desire anything, he simply seeks to journey away from everything. In Bowles stories (which take place in both South American and North African settings) the westerner, often an American, is seen as an unwanted invader by the natives of the visited region. The anti-colonial sentiment is there in these stories but Bowles' westerners seem to be the only ones unaware of it. But that is just one aspect of these stories, each story also has at least one other unsavory aspect as well(murder, incest, rape, drugs). The natives of Bowles foreign locales are usually not given much in the way of individual identities, it is the westerners who are singled out for study, the stories take place in their minds and thought processes. The foreign locales serve merely as backdrops, though very atmospheric writing makes those backdrops part of these stories appeal. Bowles' westerners are all met at a time in their lives when they are at a breaking point(Echo)or seeking departure from the past(Pages From Cold Point), or a spouse (Call at Corazon). We see a missionary in one story slowly give up hope of ever communicating to the natives he wishes to convert, in fact he is more changed by the natives than they are by him(Pastor Dowe at Tacate). In another a photographer with insomnia, a very common ailment in these stories, finds himself responding in some strange way to his surroundings, he begins to let his surroundings speak to some deeper instinctual part of him, and he slowly gives over his old identity to it, but letting his gaurd down has only made him less careful and more vulnerable to those who see him as one who is somewhere he does not belong(Tapiama)and that can never lead to any good especially not in a Bowles story. These stories will remind readers more of Poe, a favorite of Bowles, than any of the colonial or postcolonial authors because the element in his fiction that stands out most is the instability of western identity which makes it ripe for corruption. These characters are not so much seeking to arrive somewhere as escape from whence they came so really the places these sometimes horrific dramas occur in are less important than