Customer Reviews

Paul Bowles: The Sheltering Sky/ Let It Come Down/ The Spider's House (Library of America)

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I couldn't be happier that the Library of America has released Paul Bowles' three best novels (he only wrote four) in one volume. Previously they were only available in not-so-easy to find small press editions. Hopefully this edition will make them readily available to a wider audience in volume and time.

The most striking thing about Bowles' work is its pace. It moves at a mesmerizing rate. The language is fairly simple but it plods along with a suspensful tension that never lets up even after a climatic moment. It is the kind of fiction to read next to a fountain in a courtyard.

Bowles' characters are almost always out of place, or are where they shouldn't be, or where they think they should be. They become engulfed by cultures that they don't understand not through stupidity or banality but often through the natural course of clashing cultures. Reading the books can give you a feeling of getting lost, and overcome with a feeling that you don't belong, or that you're delving into worlds you aren't prepared to delve into. This is the terror that underlies nearly all of his writing. They are cautionary tales, and they have become more relevant in the past few years since Bowles' death in 1999 (not highly publicized), and the rising relevance of Islam in and to the West.

Bowles is one of the first western writers of fiction that treats Islam equally to European society. Islam is not merely a backdrop in which his characters find fault or get ground up in (i.e., you never get the sense that Bowles is blaming the cultures themselves for the destruction of his characters, typically they are responsible, but it really isn't anybody's 'fault' per se). This is multicultural literature at its best, because it allows nastiness and goodness on all sides. Bowles is not afraid to show the dark sides of Islamic and European cultures side by side, while allowing positive aspects a place as well. He is also never racist towards either side, though some critics have accussed him of this (wrongly, in my opinion).

Bowles is an eye-opener. All three of these novels will make an impact on you and make you think about things you've never thought of before. Thanks again to the Library of America for releasing this collection. Buy it and read it.

This is my first exposure to the writings of Paul Bowles. What a surprise! The three novels in this edition were written in the late 1940s to mid 1950s. His characters are not at all dated. His writing is clear, and uncluttered. In contrasted to his writing style, are his characters who complex, murky and often compelling. I read straight through from the Sheltering Sky to Let It Come Down to The Spiders House. He is one of the most interesting 20th century American writers. The Library of America has done a wonderful service to readers by ensuring that Paul Bowles will remain in print.

The Sheltering Sky, the first of three novels in this edition, is short, only 250 pages long. It seems to be considered his defining novel. It is about a married couple, Kit, and Port, and their sojourn into the Sahara Desert. They are dishonest with each other about many things, their shaky marriage, and the danger of the trip they have embarked on, fidelity. They cannot take charge of anything, their lives, their marriage, their trip, and even their privacy. The decisions that they make exude with bad judgement. This is exposed early on, when Porter goes off for a walk alone the city. He encounters a stranger, Smail; Port walks off with this stranger, out of the city into the desert to meet and be entertained by a young girl, who he is told is not a [prostitute] but will want to be paid. The characters do dangerous things. You sense their doom with them. And, like them, the reader is compelled to go on. I do not want to give too many plot details as it might spoil the pleasure of reading what I think is an overlooked 20th century classic.

Let It Come Down, is about a bank clerk seeking adventure in Tangier. Like the Sheltering Sky, there is no happy ending here. You can sense the impending doom of the main character as he makes one bad decision after another. He gets involved with a local prostitute, financial intrigue, and in the end, drugs.

The Spiders House starts with a quote from the Thousand and One Nights To my way of thinking, there is nothing more delightful than to be a stranger. And so I mingle with human beings because they are not of my kind, and precisely in order to be a stranger among them. In the wake of the worldwide effects of militant Islamism, this is a fascinating book to read.

The characters include two Americans. The first, Stenham, sees the French colonial rule in Morocco as destructive. He becomes attracted to Islam. The second is arrogant and contemptuous of the locals, the country, just about everything Moroccan. Each is stranger. Each sees and judges the Moroccan people, their culture, and their religion through western eyes. And so, Bowles introduces Amar, a teenage Moroccan boy, who is a direct descendent of the prophet, Mohammed. The boy is illiterate and poor, but not ignorant. The view of the world that each maintains at the beginning of the novel cannot hold. Set in a time of rebellion, there is plenty of plot to keep the characters moving along.

I highly recommend these three novels. This hard cover edition is published by the Library of America. It is the one that you will want to buy, and keep as part of your permanent library.

You can read the other detailed reviews, all earning 5 stars, and see why this item is ranked so highly. Three novels all in one nice, hardbound, 900+ pages volume, at a great price. I already had all three in paperback, and still ordered this book. If you love Paul Bowles as I do, or are just beginning to read his work, this is the book to buy.

I am captivated by the observations and writing style of Bowles that both brings me into his characters and the settings of Morroco. I was also prepared for my trip to Morroco (where i am writing this from) in the sense of cultural moods and a a few phrases. I have a feeling that his writing seeped something of Morroco into me that gave me some of the confidence I needed as an american in this foreign world.

As I write this I'm listening to King Crimson's classic instrumental "The Sheltering Sky," which is as mesmerizing as Paul Bowles' novel of the same name. What I love about Bowles fiction (particularly his short stories, but these novels are fine, too) is how simply told it is. The prose is uncluttered and the plots very straight forward. Yet, what happens to his characters is often horrible or horrific. As Tobias Wolff wrote, "they move with the inevitability of myth." Also, despite the fact that they were written decades ago, they're still relevant today, because they typically depict Americans traveling in the Muslim world, totally taking it for granted and ultimately paying the price. Prescient stuff.

Once more after finishing "Let It Come Down" by Paul Bowles I have become aware that some people are doomed to self-destruction and they rush there from their unhappiness and loneliness, from inability to adapt the surrounding reality, from consuming inside emptiness which tells them keep going from there. There is no escape from this horror of existence " a certain day, at a certain moment, the house would crumble and nothing would be left but dust and rubble, indistinguishable from the talus of gravel that lay below the cliffs. It would be absolutely silent, the falling of the house, like a film that goes on running after the sound apparatus has broken." Together with us the time will slowly dissolve falling to pieces and nobody would care that once " there were places in time to be visited, faces to forget, words to understand, silences to be studied", only the inhuman night will remain.
I am not horrified with the end of the novel, I knew I was reading Paul Bowles, I am not disgusted with the protagonist Dyar, I only feel pity for him and experience an immense fear of a fragile human soul that may break any moment searching for its place, "a definite status, a precise relationship with the rest of men" in a hostile world that we are responsible for creating ourselves.
I am amazed how through all the novel, the rain deciphers the coming events: it pours, rains heavily or calmly, it can rain indifferently or dip in a desultory fashion, it rains lightly bringing hope with a soft sound of falling, it offers watery sky, wet gray colorless twilight and in the end of the novel it produces the dead flat sound spreading around. The same is with the wind which blows from all the directions changing from a sweet breeze to a wind which carries the paralyzing promise of winter or a strong malevolent evil clattering the door.
I think I have learnt one simple truth from Paul Bowles: the dreamers can't be happy, you must have simple daily achievable goals to feel content just to be alive on a fine sunny morning, however, one thing is to realize it, quite another to try to turn your thoughts off.