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My Sister's Hand in Mine: The Collected Works of Jane Bowles

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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.

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.

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.

Jane Bowles is still an unfortunately neglected writer despite Tennessee Williams' statement that she is our finest American prose fiction writer. He wrote that in the early 70s, and it is still true today. She manages to surprise and fascinate and perplex and amuse in nearly every sentence. She is the kind of original our university writing courses and the 'searching for a hit' publishing industry are stifling.

I really wish I could jump on the bandwagon of singing Jane Bowles' praises, but I haven't been able to understand what all the fuss is about. "The greatest novelist of the century?" Whoa--this is not on my list of the top 100. I've long been a great fan of Paul Bowles--surely one of the most intense and talented writers of the last century--and Jane sounded interesting in all the reviews, but after reading both Camp Cataract and Two Serious Ladies, and several other of the stories, I was disappointed. Almost all are about odd, neurotic women with overpowering urges to escape their dreary lives of conformity, and/or who relate to other odd, neurotic women in strangely belligerant ways. All of the male characters are pathetic and superfluous, or are at least treated that way by women who have no use for them.

I found it frustrating that all of the characters constantly make decisions, or say things, that seem without any apparent motivation. It's very difficult to get a read on why any of the characters do what they do. A woman who seems to have been content all her life to live a staid, "respectable" existence decides she's going to be a prostitute. Why? Then she decides not to. Why? There's no explanation, in either inner monologue, dialogue, background plot, or anything--the characters just do things that seem...strange. I like strange--Paul Bowles, for example, can be very strange, and it's fascinating--but Jane seems to keep writing, I assume, about herself, in the obsessive manner of the narcissist who can't stop thinking and talking and writing about her personal concerns as though they were universal. And maybe they are universal, among lesbians, I can't say.

Paul Bowles is timeless--his stories could have been written yesterday. Jane's are musty and dated, as well as very unsatisfying. They may be very fertile ground for exploring Jane's psyche, but if that's not of primary interest to you, you may find yourself finishing one story after another saying "Now what was that all about?"

Incredible book. Jane Bowles has the unique characteristic of amusing and depressing us at the same time. Two serious ladies and her short fiction(Camp Catarat and Plain Pleasures are masterpieces) are unique. Her play is funny but she is not as good as in her narrative.
What you will find in this book is a complete diferent way of understanding live, you will encounter an original brain that expreses itself with the most personal sentences you will ever read. Jane stands alone in the whole literary tradition. Surrounded by her terror, obsessions and complete understanding of human heart what Bowles achieves is the perfect expression of human essence.

The only bad thing about this collection is that Bowles' collected work is so limited. The writing is experimental, intriguing and engaging. Her language is so fresh. The different genres show her reach as an artist. You only wish that she had been more prolific. She will be read for years to come.

The novel "Two Serious Ladies" (included) is alone worth the price of admission.

The only thing that wasn't brand new about the used book I received from Amazon was the low price. It took a couple of days longer to get than I expected but was well worth the wait for the book I received. I am very happy with my purchase.

If you've not read Jane Bowles, stop what you're doing and buy this book now. Everything in it will enrich you. Every sentence is an object of pleasure, every character a shrewdly observed or constructed being. Along with Jean Rhys, Bowles is one of the most important writers of the last century.