Two Serious Ladies

This is fiction for persons who can accept of their fiction the same things they expect of life: slipping, sliding, blind-turning, colliding, parting, bewilderment, and a great deal of sly humor. Life does not dole out sane rational narratives. The eternal mystery is why people expect fiction to do so. Does fiction for them represent a means of imposing form on life?

Two serious ladies is a very strange book. The first time I read it I didn't quite undestand it but it caught me instantly. Jane Bowle's style is amazing. Circles and circles of rare relationships, quear people, exotic and everyday's ambients, perfect sentences, subtle humour forms this authentic masterpiece.Once read, it will stay in your mind. Why do these women behave as they do?, what is Bowles triying to tell us? It's all crypt. You can read it and read it all over again and again and your conclusions will change.Bowle's other writing (a play and short fiction)has the same quality: refreshing, new, modern. Nothing you will read will present you such an original brain. After all our tradition is that of sinners

With shrewd wit, candour and a touch of the bizarre, Two Serious Ladies follows the demise into debauchery of two very dissimilar yet equally stodgy women, who aquire a fondness for eccentric personages. Christina Goering - rich, saintly spinster - turns high class call girl, whilst Frieda Copperfield - caught in a respectable, though staid marriage - abandons her husband for Pacifica, a Panamanian prostitute. The restless, autonomous, asexual female seeking self determination independent from men is a poignant theme which Jane Bowles explores with remarkable cleverness, hilarity and ruthless originality.Two Serious Ladies is a marvellous example of Jane Bowles' extraordinary talent as a writer of contemporary fiction - often obscured by her small literary output and the talent of her husband, writer Paul Bowles ... unfortuately so.