Distant Episode [Hardcover]

Paul Bowles (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 24, 2000

A Distant Episode contains the best of Paul Bowles's short stories, as selected by the author. An American cult figure, Bowles has fascinated such disparate talents as Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Truman Capote, William S. Burroughs, Gore Vidal, and Jay McInerney.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Movement and dark exotica are the hallmarks of any Paul Bowles story. In the title piece a linguist bums his way down on a bus to "the warm country" in what may well be Morocco, returning to a town--and a friend--he has not seen in 10 years. He learns that the friend has died and, overcome by a perverse and almost exalted carelessness, makes a curious proposition to the qaouaji who serves him tea. The strange becomes the sinister; the lonely becomes a hallucinatory horror. When the unspeakable finally comes to pass (the dogs, the guns, the evil men), it's a relief.

The characters in these stories are shaped and fated by place. "The pleasure of writing stories, as opposed to novels," Bowles observes in the preface, "lies in the freedom to allow protagonists to invent their own personalities as they emerge from the landscape." The collection that ensues, chosen by the author and written over a 40-year period, reflects this creed. And the improvisational feel of the works comes precisely from the power place is accorded as the dominant force on characters and their actions.

Characters adrift in menacingly unfamiliar places--Algeria, Marrakech, Colombia--are people exiled or en route to exile. For two such travelers, this might be a quintessential Bowles moment:

He: "You think you humor me so much? I haven't noticed it." His voice was sullen.

She: "I don't humor you at all. I'm just trying to live with you on an extended trip in a lot of cramped little cabins on an endless series of stinking boats."

Bowles's delivery--deadpan, without affectation, hyperbole, or discourse--sets up a disconcerting and delicious tension. Fate, in each story, is allowed to play itself out with no authorial summing-up, no interjection against the intractable landscape. Remember that Bowles country acknowledges a debt to the sensibilities of such literary peers as Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Jay McInerney. Don't look for meaning in the obvious places. Let it emerge like insights and connections made from the stuff of the subconscious. Regardless, this collection offers the good old-fashioned experience of excellent fiction--from a writer who will blow your assumptions about the world wide open. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

A noted composer and novelist, Bowles has won widest acclaim for his short stories. The selection he has made here stretches from The Delicate Prey ( LJ 11/15/50) through Unwelcome Words (Tombouctou, 1988) and adds two uncollected stories. Most utilize a Third World setting (Latin America, Sri Lanka, North Africa) to dramatize the bankruptcy of Western values. Though later works are less extreme in their violence, the title story is typical: a linguistics professor laden with "maps, sun lotions and medicines" is relieved of his tongue and his senses by the tribe he would study. Bowles has emerged as one of our most important contemporary writers, and academic and public libraries not already holding several of his collections will want this volume. Grove Koger, Boise P.L., Id.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: ECCO Press,U.S.; 1st edition (March 24, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0880012048
• ISBN-13: 978-0880012041
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,324,245 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tales of Those Away From Home, November 8, 2001

By 

Doug Anderson (Miami Beach, Florida United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: A Distant Episode (Paperback)

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.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Powerful stories from another world, April 4, 2009

By 

John C. Stepper (New York City) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: A Distant Episode: The Selected Stories (Paperback)

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.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Walking into the dark, sinister desert of perverse fantasy., September 4, 2000

By 

John McCormack (Mahopac, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Distant Episode (Paperback)

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.