Customer Reviews

Let It Come Down

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Ah, Paul Bowles, you fiend! In "Let it Come Down," all the paranoid extremes which usually lurk beneath the surface are stripped to the bone, and the freakish products of repression and misunderstanding take center stage. In this book everything that has characterized his stuff (deliberately paced descents into hell that sneak up on you when you least expect it--freaky, druggy, exotic psychological and metaphorical thrillers) is distilled, and instead of mellowing out the sting of his work, it amplifies the impact. It is the essential Paul Bowles novel.

Bowles' narrative is the usual "not-as-much-of-a-stranger-as-he-thought-in-a-strange-land" tale of misfortune, but this time, Bowles succeeds in making us eager for his hapless protagonist's fate. Dyar, an uncharismatic, unsatisfied, and woefully repressed New Yorker who accepts a job from a friend in the schizophrenic Tangier of the fifties--a city that doesn't exist anymore, and didn't when the book was first published. Bowles' Tangiers is a dirty and debaucherous, a big stew of misfits and expats, and he does this in his trademark smoky, sly atmosphere. Here we see where Bowles is taking us, and even though we're dreading what's in store for our self-absorbed, pathetic hero, we're looking forward to it nonetheless, and with evil glee.

This is a good place to start with Paul Bowles.

"Let it Come Down" is the story of an American who travels to Tangier in search of an exciting new life, but winds up living a nightmare. It illustrates what can happen when you let a desire for adventure take control of your life and that there is a savage spirit in the most outwardly civilised human being. I believe this book was handwritten by lamplight on an island Paul Bowles once owned..... "Let it Come Down" is my favourite Bowles novel by far. Shorter and easier to read than his best-known work, "The Sheltering Sky", the key concepts in "Let it Come Down" seem to be more clearly defined and, as a result, the novel has a quicker pace and more confident feel. Although written quite some time ago, Bowles' dark style is as hip as if it were written yesterday. The mix of exotic setting, sex, violence, and drugs will keep you turning the pages, and the social commentary and dark yet plain writing style will haunt you long after you've turned the last page.

Ah..It is so quintesential Paul Bowles. If you ever thought You could fill the boredom and tedium life often has to offer by jaunting off to find adventure in another county, Paul Bowles will show you the horrors of trying to run away from yourself. The main Character Dyar is only a half formed person who makes the mistake of throwing himself in the middle of a very unstable Morocco where all the other expatriots hiding out smell his weakeness and jump at the chance to take advantage of him for their own devious means. At first you feel pity for him but soon it turns to disgust. I don't want to give away the whole book, but know that though the plot is dark it is filled with insight and magnificent landscapes.

I bought this book (and The Sheltering Sky) at amazon.com before a recent trip to Morocco. Tangier was the last stop on our trip, and I read most of the book on a rainy afternoon at the American Legation (which figures heavily in the novel). In the introduction, Mr. Bowles remarks that the Tangier described in the novel is a thing of the past, but I didn't think that was entirely true. Tangier is truly intoxicating because it's decadent in the literal sense of the word. It looks sort of like Cannes or Nice, but is coming apart at the seams. As for the novel, the story is both intriguing and terrifying. As the characters take more and more hashish, they become less and less aware of the consequences of their actions. The end is truly horrifying because Mr. Bowles's spare, simple prose gives the feeling that anyone -- even you -- is capable of committing a terrible act of violence without suffering an ounce of remorse. But that's not the interesting part of my review -- after a couple of hours of reading we went to see Paul Bowles himself! It was rather like going to see Yoda. He still lives in Tangier, and doesn't have a telephone, so if you want to visit him you have to turn up unannounced and hope he's at home. These days he's at home quite a lot (88 years of fast living have taken their toll) so chances are you'll find him. The taxi driver was astounded when we arrived at the address we'd been given; he couldn't believe two American women could possibly have business in such a run-down spot. The concierge took us up to the top floor in an elevator that had no doors. She pounded on the door and rang the bell but no one answered, so she invited us to wait in her apartment and made us mint tea. She spoke no French and we spoke no Arabic, so conversation was rather strained, but she was incredibly friendly and seemed quite used to having total strangers turn up asking for Monsieur Paul (as he's known). After an hour or so, a chauffeur turned up and ushered us into the apartment. It was filled with books and medicines, and smelled like a nursing home. The windows were covered with blackout curtains, so it was impossible to tell whether it was day or night. "He's very sick," the man told us, "so you can only stay for a few minutes." We were shown into a bedroom, and there was Paul Bowles -- darling of New York critics, socialites, rock stars, and beat poets -- propped up in bed wearing the brown cashmere bathrobe described in Tangier Days and eating Chips Ahoy cookies from a waxed paper bag. He was very very frail, quite hard of hearing and nearly blind from glaucoma, but seemed flattered that we'd enjoyed his books enough to come all the way to Tangier to visit him. And when we asked about his writing, he seemed just as detached as the characters in his novels. As we left, I asked him to sign my copy of Let It Come Down; it now bears the inscription "Paul Bowles, Tangier, 10 March 1999." It's the best souvenir I have.

What would you do if you were dropped into the middle of a small Moroccan town with a briefcase full of embezzled currency under your arm in bills too big to change, not speaking the language, high on kif, marked as a foreigner, lost in the streets & unable to ask for help for fear the police will discover you sneaked in illegally from Tangier?

That's the existential crisis "Let It Come Down" builds up to, and like Kit's similar predicament in "The Sheltering Sky," it turns out against all expectations to be a strangely liberating one for the main character, who discovers a sense of pattern and purpose in his life only at its extremes. I liked this story better than Bowles's more famous novel: the plot is more focused, the characters better drawn (especially the ancillary expatriates like Eunice Goode and Daisy de Valverde, based on personalities Bowles knew first-hand in Tangier), and the individual scenes in the bars, cafes, and great homes of Morocco's International Zone more noir and threatening than the sleepy imperial outposts in "The Sheltering Sky." Best of all, Bowles takes a stab at a Moroccan character, the sympathetic and streetwise Thami, who picks up some of the narrative slack from the story's flat anti-hero, Dyar.

Bowles wrote the last section of the book, "Another Kind of Silence," with the help of kif, not knowing where the plot would go next, just letting it come down of its own accord. It's the most experimental but maybe also the most unsatisfying part of the novel, where Bowles indulges in vague philosophical speculations on the meaning of existence while pushing his characters through a desultory plot that involves a lot of aimless walking around, eating, and descriptions of altered states of mind. I liked Bowles's honesty in exposing the plot as just a contrivance, a sort of buttering-up for the great truths he wants to deliver at the end, and the last section is where the intellectual meat of the novel is. But I thought the elements he'd put into motion in the earlier parts were too good to be dropped so carelessly. Daisy & Luis, Eunice, Hadija, even Wilcox--and certainly Thami--deserve more than the story finally gives them. Still, it's a fun read with an impeccable feel for a vanished Tangier.

Paul Bowles (THE SHELTERING SKY) lived as an American expatriate in Tangier, Morocco, where he wrote LET IT COME DOWN (1952). Set in the 1950s, Bowles' novel--reminiscent of Camus' STRANGER--follows Nelson Dyar, who leaves his mundane job as a bank job in New York to work in a friend's travel agency in Tangier, where he soon discovers that the agency is only a front for an illegal currency exchange. Dyar is a "wire-haired terrier" of a man--"alert, eager, suggestible" (p. 104), but he lacks brains and soul. Although he resides in an exotic city, Dyar, as his name suggests, is essentially already a dead man living a meaningless existence. "For years," Dyar "had gone along not being noticed, not noticing himself, accompanying the days mechanically, exaggerating the exertion and boredom of the day to give him sleep at night, and using the sleep to provide the energy to go through the following day" (p. 177). Dyar describes himself as a "victim" (p. 8), and soon after his arrival in Morocco, Bowles' protagonist is victimized by the situational, exotic culture of expatriates, drugs, alcohol, and casual sex that permeates Tangier. However, Dyar is neither a sympathetic nor a likable character, who seems to live a separate existence. He falls into a meaningless relationship with Hadija, a young prostitute, who is also the object of an alcoholic lesbian heiress's affections. Perhaps much like his former life in New York, Dyar's life in Tangier never becomes a movement toward or away from anything, he only continues to live his "life for life's sake . . . in the meantime you eat" (p. 183), all of which results not only in a darkly intriguing novel, but a highly satisfying existential thriller as well.

G. Merritt

Something's going to happen, Dyar can just feel it. He doesn't know what, he doesn't know when, but until it does his life can't truly begin, and it needs to begin pretty soon, because he's already 30 and although it's not too late yet, it's getting there.

Dyar is an American who's come to Tangier to escape life behind a cage as a bank teller. But from the moment he arrives in this most exotic of cities, he get himself in over his head with the expatriates of the International Zone where, in the famous words of Hassan I Sabbah, "nothing is true and everything is permitted--sort of, if you know the rules of the game.

The problem for Dyar is that he doesn't know the rules. As a result, he ends up making all the wrong moves and becomes the pawn of all the other players: a local prostitute, a group of currency smugglers, a Russian spy, the bored wife of an exiled Spanish aristocrat. With incredible speed and ineptitude Dyar sets himself up for the fall, which is all the more tragic inasmuch as he's obsessed with the idea of not being numbered among life's victims.

Yet his lack of experience, his naiveté, his basic immaturity virtually guarantee that he'll end up victimized.

"Let It Come Down" bears a striking resemblance to Camus' "The Stranger," but in my opinion, Bowles' novel is a good deal more powerful a treatment of a similar theme. Dyar is trying desperately to convince himself of the reality of his existence, and as his desperation increases and his failures accumulate, he commits one last horrendous act meant to define himself once and for all. The hashish-inspired series of revelations that he undergoes towards the end of the novel and the shocking culmination of violence that serves as the capstone to "Let It Come Down" will not be easily forgotten.

Bowles is a wonderful prose stylist--clear and readable and yet philosophically sophisticated in a way one doesn't ordinarily expect in American novelists. He is, for instance, far deeper and more complex a writer than Hemingway, with whom he's sometimes compared. It's an unfair comparison, in any event, for Bowles' is, in my view, a far superior writer in every regard.

A book and an author well-worth discovering, or rediscovering, one can't go wrong with Paul Bowles' "Let It Come Down"--both are greatly underestimated and under-read. Its quite likely that will change as a retrospective examination of 20th century American literature is made in the not-so-distant future.

Paul Bowles had already established himself as an American composer when, at the age of 38, he published 'The Sheltering Sky' and became one of the most powerful writers after world war two. By the time of his death in 1999 he had become a legendary writer. From his base in Tangier he produced novels, stories, and travel writings. Bowles describes collisions between 'civilized' exiles and unfamiliar societies. In fiction of slowly growing menace, he achieves effects of horror and dislocation.

In 'Let It Come Down' ( 1952 ), Bowles tells the doomed trajectory of Nelson Dyer, a New York bank teller who comes to Tangier in search of a different life and ends up giving in to his darkest impulses. Rich in descriptions of the corruption and decadence of the International Zone in the last days before Moroccan independence, Bowles second novel is a comic and at the same time horror-like account of a descent into the pool of nihilism.

I give 4 stars because Bowles' philosophy is sometimes oversimplified and the comical can be childish. For instance one of the characters slips over a little heap of dung and he falls to the ground. But altogether this book is interesting for its mixture of adventure and vivid descriptions of Tangier and the surrounding landscapes.

"Let it come down" is an interesting novel by Paul
Bowles, taking place in Tanger. Paul Bowles
has been living in this Moroccan city since the forties. It's his
second novel, after the more well-known "The Sheltering Sky"
(filmed by Bertolucci in 1990).
"Let it come down" deals with Nelson Dyar, an American bank-clerck
who comes to Tanger, hoping he can start another, less boring life.
But Tanger in the fifties was a place of corruption and intrigue and
soon Nelson will be the victim of both emotional problems (he falls
in love with a young Moroccan prostitute), financial intrigues
and finally drugs.
Bowles pictures life in Tangier in this periode in a marvellous
way : it's the background of the beat generation writers who came
to live or stay in this city because of cheap live and love.
Bowles is my favourite American writer and "Let it come down"
is the favourite of his novels for me. It tells me about the danger
of thinking that one can escape everyday life, of changing it for a
new life : a life in which one might lose control of the situation
and in which one might become the subject of events rather than
an active participant.
I visited Tanger in '92, when life was quite different there.
I also wrote a short story on this subject : "The road to Tanger"
(in Dutch, though).

I am a total Paul Bowles fan and this is the crowning masterpiece of his career. I wish I could give this novel 10 stars rather than just 5. Whereas Sheltering Sky and The Spider's House are totally excellent, Let It Come Down moves beyond them into the territory of the totally blank driftless soul with no meaning, a situation that Bowles shows is the most dangerous of all states of the soul.

The basic story is that of an American average young man, but beware, he is about as average as the frightful vapid drifters that populate the novels of David Plante. In fact the protagonist of Plante's The Age of Terror is similar to Bowles' protagonist, Nelson Dyar. Nelson Dyar comes to Tangier Morocco in the 1950s to work for the son of a friend of his mother's who runs a travel agency that is involved in illegal currency transactions. A plot is hatched to scam the currency exchange and Nelson is the fall-guy. But beware the fall-guy with brains and no soul. He meets a young prostitute, Hadija, but they don't fall into love, they fall into driftless sexual obsession with no future or commitment. Hadija is also pursued by an obese alcoholic ill-tempered lesbian heiress. One of the most vivid scenes in the novel is when this lesbian, Eunice Goode, goes to a cocktail party for Americans and Europeans hosted by two successful Morrocan businessmen. She drinks too much and passes out,in her long evening gown, on the walk leading from the patio, thus requiring every guest to step over her rotund sloppy mass of fat flesh to reach their cars to exit the party. Yet Eunice is only one of numerous characters of low intentions and lost expectations.

The parade of low-life Westerners may be a commentary on the value systems of the modern sophisticated American and European consciousness in comparison to the world of North African Islam. But I think there is more being said here. Nelson goes beyond the simple greed and lust and ego-centered schemes of the other characters and enters the world of total amorality. He moves beyond greed and into the world of the emotionless and thoughtless killer.

This supreme work of existentialist terror is embedded in a novel of beautiful spare poetic language. Nelson is no witty clever antisocial Ripley from a Patricia Highsmith novel. He is far more empty, a Zen murderer, a driftless pointless danger.