Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Night, Let Me Be Numbered Among Thy Sons And Daughters, July 26, 2004
My Sister's Hand In Mine: The Collected Works Of Jane Bowles (1970) offers readers the rewarding opportunity of entering the strange but oddly homey world of its author. The volume contains Bowles' only novel, Two Serious Ladies, her single work for the theater, the uneven In the Summer House, and thirteen short stories and unfinished pieces. The book's real strengths are Two Serious Ladies and the long story Camp Cataract, works that compliment one another and successfully define the unique landscape of Bowles' vision.
Married to the more famous novelist, composer, and expatriate Paul Bowles, Jane was an apparently bisexual woman with strong lesbian leanings. Though her liveliness and wit were widely appreciated by other artists of the period, most of whom were also ardent admirers of her talent, Bowles' life was compromised by anxiety, and her final years were marked by severe illness and tragedy.
The individualistic Bowles was probably an introvert in Jung's original definition of term. Her character's fears largely revolve around the idea of "passage into the outside world," the states of existence that most people must inevitably face, embrace, and accept beyond the personalized state of the home and the nuclear family. But while confronting the outer world is a unpleasant necessity for most of Bowles' characters, family life, far from a paradise, remains a sentimentally idealized but claustrophobic circle in hell. Achieving and maintaining states of grace was also an important matter for the author, though her unsettlingly tragicomic approach to both these themes has historically kept her work from being widely understood and accepted as mainstream American literature. While other idiosyncratic writers like the vastly more prolific Muriel Spark have enjoyed decades of popularity and critical and commercial success and thus the opportunity to carefully evolve their personal vision, Bowles found the act of writing difficult, and her readership during her lifetime, in commercial terms, almost nonexistent.
Two Serious Ladies concerns Christina Goering and Frieda Copperfield, casual acquaintances who synchronistically strike out on no longer avoidable quests for personal salvation after meeting at a Manhattan party.
While Mrs. Copperfield seems to be seeking fulfilling love and all kinds of meaningful sensual pleasure, the independently wealthy Miss Goering apparently seeks spiritual development through material sacrifice, meager living, and confrontation with her fears in their social and public forms. Both women are simultaneously asexual and semi-consciously lesbian in their preferences; the married Mrs. Copperfield enthusiastically chases the love and company of other women in a Central American village, while the somewhat sheltered but more confident Miss Goering, who shares her home with both a woman and a man in an ambiguous arrangement, actively pursues first a failed businessman and then a gangster in the name of achieving her goals. Both women are weirdly naive, and Bowles never allows the reader a clear understanding of how knowledgeable, sophisticated, or self aware either character is. Both encounter and embrace a hilarious assemblage of oddball characters and misfits; like Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield, these eccentrics often seem incapable of objective or comparative perception, and may thus be doomed to lives of starchy parochialism. Only Mr. Copperfield, a figure unmistakably based on Paul Bowles, seems stable, clear-headed, and rationally self-motivated.
Unstable, indeterminate social conventions and mores haunt Bowles' characters. Routine train rides, visits to relative's homes, evenings out in taverns and restaurants, business meetings, and even the simple act of purchasing become comic war zones in which all present seem to enjoy a vastly different understanding of what behavior is appropriate and acceptable. Misunderstandings, breaches of etiquette, emotional hypersensitivity, and insults are common in The Collected Works Of Jane Bowles; fluid, trusting, easy, and healthy communication is sadly unknown.
The grueling Camp Cataract concerns a shrewd, secretive, and uncommonly self aware adult woman, Harriet, who is quietly and carefully planning a final break from her smothering and unconsciously incestuous sister Sadie. Unlike Two Serious Ladies, Camp Cataract contains surreal elements, fugue states, and odd flights of fantasy, but is also more far more specific about the intentions and inner workings of its characters: Harriet's desperate motivations are laid bear in a way that neither Miss Goering's and Mrs. Copperfield's ever are. During her alternately forlorn and energetic pursuit of her sister, Sadie is unpleasantly forced to confront the devouring public world she fears as well as the heavily repressed psychosexual underpinnings of her character. Though wildly funny, few works of fiction can cause readers to twist and squirm like Camp Cataract.
Throughout, the writing is simple, subtle, admirably crisp, and compellingly readable; Bowles is also a master of peculiar, perfectly timed dialogue, a talent she uses to great effect throughout. Also notable are A Guatemalan Idyll, originally a section of Two Serious Ladies, and A Stick Of Green Candy, in which a young girl learns that violating the fidelity of her creative imagination brings about the permanent end of innocent fantasy.
|
|
|
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Read a future classic now., November 4, 1999
By A Customer
While the entire collection is notable, I have to say that "Two Serious Women" seems to me to be the real masterpiece here. I read it ten or so years ago for the first time and liked it but found it rather dark. I re-read it a few years ago and liked it much more than I had the first time, finding it hillarious, albeit darkly. I was happily surprised all over again by the unpredictable behavior of the characters. Unlike many novels, this one is almost immediately engaging, with its portrait of the young Christina Goering's religion-obsessed childhood games. Jane Bowles is often lumped in with her husband; but her writing, though less voluminous, is more unique, more inventive. This is writing well worth repeated reading.
|
|
|
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Jane Bowles deserves a wider readership., September 25, 1999
By A Customer
Jane Bowles' prose is strange and beautiful. It's never quite clear why her characters act the way they do, but they leave such haunting impressions that her novel and stories beg to be read a second time. My Sister's Hand in Mine is a great companion piece to Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky, which shares the split cold/emotional nature of Jane's work, and also themes of Americans abroad. Jane's novel Two Serious Ladies, which opens this collection, is a stunner. A wonderful writer; I wish she'd written more.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
by Jorge Luis Borges
by Lydia Davis
by Miranda July
by Paul Bowles
See all Editorial Reviews
