Customer Reviews

Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue: Scenes from the Non-Christian World

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This is a peculiar work, and one which really doesn't fit neatly into any generic niche. In some respects it recalls travel journals written by literary men in the past, such as Sterne's (Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, Goethe's (Italian Journey) or Voltaire's (Letters from England) , as it combines descriptive details about particular regions with a modicum of philosophizing and social critique.

The first two pieces in the book deal with Sri Lanka (known in the fifties when this book was written as Ceylon). Bowles lived in Weligma, South Ceylon from 1952 to 1959. A black-and-white photo (all the pictures acompanying the text or B&W) depicts the incredibly lush vista he enjoyed from his veranda. The beauty of the place is largely counterbalanced by Bowles' descriptions of the intolerable heat and humidity of the region, which combined with the incessant swarms of mosquitoes, made a good night's sleep about impossible. This would be a recurring motif throughout the reports. Finding lodging and adequate sleeping arrangements were constant aggravations in the out-of-the way environs Bowles visits.

When Bowles writes of out-of-the way destinations, they really are remote in the strictest sense of the word. He takes the reader to regions that were (and are, for the most part) seldom visited by western travellers, and there are good reasons these are not popular tourist spots. Most of the towns don't possess what any western traveller would think of as a hotel. In practically every town (and that is a loose description as well) the only place a traveller can find quarters is at some hovel, where electricity, much less plumbing, is a rarity.

The reader may ask, why did Bowles choose to visit such remote habitats? The answer to that lies in his section on the Sahara, in which he talks about the "Baptism of Solitude," a motif that is of great significance in his major novel, The Sheltering Sky. Bowles describes it here: "You leave the gate of the fort or the town behind, pass the camels lying outside, go up into the dunes, or out into the hard, stony plain and stand awhile, alone. Presently, you will either shiver and hurry back inside the walls, or you will go on standing there and let something very peculiar happen to you, something that everyone who lives there has undergone and which the French call "le bapteme de la solitude." It is a unique sensation and has nothing to do with loneliness, for loneliness presupposes memory. Here, in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears; nothing is left but your own breathing and the sound of your heart beating. A strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintegration begins inside you, and you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaing the person you have always been, or letting it take its course. For no one who has stayed in the Sahara for awhile is quite the same as when he came."

This quote, which is central to this book, both literally and figuratively, is also at the core of Bowles' entire ouvre. He writes repeatedly of the individual in isolation, but always redefining and reconfiguring the terms and meaning of "isolation."

I don't know how much T. H. Lawrence Bowles read, but there are some definite parallels in the lives of the two men. Both are expatriates (Lawrence from Britain, Bowles from America) who were committed to and seduced by the desert, and by the predominately Moslem cultures they interacted with. They were also equally seduced by hardship and discomfort, actually revelling in extremely unpleasant conditions, which would repulse and defer most of their countrymen. I am sure that Lawrence had his initial Baptism of Solitude shortly after his arrival in the Sahara himself. He even describes a similar transformation in his description of the desert in his Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Bowles is an author with whom every serious reader should become familiar. His prose is uniformly excellent. He has great descriptive power and captures the nuances of foreign customs and cultures more than adroitly. This may prove to be a good starting point for those unfamiliar with his novels or his other works. He was an accomplished composer as well. He was an Eastern beacon to the Beat Generation. Every important Beat writer made a sojourn to Tangiers, where Bowles held court for many years. He also lived a fascinating life in other respects and his wife, Jane, also wrote an intriguing novel of her own that I would likewise recommend.

If you are wondering about that title, it's an Edward Lear Lyric:
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.
This is a collection of eight travel essays all written in the 1950's. Bowles' sets down quite simply why he travels, "Each time I go to a place I have not seen before, I hope it will be as different as possible from the places I already know." And it is not different landscapes(which alone are of "insufficient interest") he seeks but different peoples, "North Africa without its tribes, inhabited by, let us say, the Swiss, would be merely a rather more barren California." And there is always the pleasant feeling when leaving ones own homeland of becoming a stranger in someone elses. Anyone who knows Bowles immaculate tales of delicate strangers purposely stranded will find this book a light read but also a pleasant and informative diversion into the Arab world. My favorite essay is "The Rif, to music". Bowles finds the key to Morocco's culture in its music. Their traditons and histories are not written down but rather passed down in song. In this chapter Paul is at work compiling what will eventually be the definitive collection of North African tribal music(now in the library of congress). To do so he has to travel to remote regions with tape recorder and runs into every difficulty imaginable with local governments and with the musicians themselves. Bowles laments the fact that the purity of the tribal music is vanishing as travel permits the musicians to play for larger and larger groups which has had diminishing effect on the music. The musicians play shorter and slicker versions of their music to please the crowds. There is a Bowles poem(though it is not in this book) which addresses this called Delicate Song:
It was a long trip back.
White lilies waved by walls.
The sweat from blue grapes
Shone like glass.
A wind blown straight from the harbor
Brushed the long grass.
I suppose we thought of the harbor
And of how it looked with its blue water
And its sailboats moving.

But even though the wind smelt of waves
And of the swamp grass nearer
Our thoughts were of the road.

Flutes are scarcer these days
And flutists are unskilled.
The white lilies were by walls.

The music does still exist though. An excellent CD was released in 1992, The Master Musicians of Jajouka, "Apocalypse Across the Sky"(Axiom). If they ever stop playing, legend holds, the world will end.

I must disagree with the review written by T. Ross. The essays on travel are not dated any more than Paul Bowles wonderful prose is, which borders on the poetic. Certainly these essays were written in the fifties, but Bowles portraits of North Africans (and European settlers) are so vivid one can almost feel them breathe. The essay concerning Mustafa, a male Muslim and his beliefs should be required reading for the State Department, the Pentagon, and the Administration. As a poet and writer I appreciated Bowles style and his skill in presenting physical, philosophical and emotional landscapes. I highly recommend this book.

I like this book better than some of Mr. Bowles' longer fictional efforts. He is good at relatively short accounts, where his rich life experiences are related through highly descriptive prose. Bowles captures the abnormal psychology of the planet itself moreso than that of the individual, which is better left to Camus or Faulkner. Also, he is able to find some humor and meaning in the Western-Arab relationship, which helps relieve some of the strain of our current showdown, which Mr. Bowles foresaw. Especially funny to me is an account by Bowles of finding a filthy rag at the bottom of a pail of murky water he and his Arab travelmate had been using for drinking water. They up and left the "hotel" (and town) that day.

Also of interest are chapters on Ceylon.

Bowles seems to be more capable writing about real people and events than he is when functioning in the only slightly altered world of his fiction. I think it has something to do with him being an emotional loner. Like Sartre, he is more of an observer, more of a thinker, than a writer, so his fictional characterizations are, like Sartre's, often wooden and unconvincing (to me at least). To this viewpoint, he would strongly object I think. But, notice I refrain from calling him a moralist or a philosopher. If he were a painter, I would classify him as a post-impressionist like Matisse (great colorist, intriguing designs, romantic, but limited by "decorative" priorities.) And, like Matisse, he never really shocks me like a true Fauve because, no matter how gruesome the details of the narrative, his narrative voice is always too cultivated. He can't help it; he's from New England. For his fictional style to match the content, his manner would need to be cruder, like Kirchner or Vlaminck. And he is really not a portrait artist like Dickens, Joyce or Faulkner either. Or, maybe it's that his portraits capture places and milieus moreso than individual psyches. In this book, it doesn't matter because he is truly in his element: he travels wildly, observes meticulously and remembers creatively.

Here we see into the mind of the Muslim. It is a startling, stark land influenced by the harsh desert and harsher religion. Quite interesting as this is kind of the pure view where much of the worlds news is now stemming from.

Paul Bowles's collection of travel pieces dating from 1950-1963 reveals a love of solitude and the unfamiliar road in a time when American influence began to dominate the post-war world. Seeking refuge from growing American conformity at home, Tangier, Morocco became Bowles's permanent address in 1947. Tangier made an ideal jumping-off point for Bowles, who visited Sri Lanka (Ceylon) in 1950, Cape Coromin, India in 1952, Istanbul, Turkey in 1953, and made frequent trips into Morocco and the Sahara, where he documented and recorded its music and musicians.

His travel writing can be at once witty and withering. Many of his observations are about the discomforts and disappointments of traveling; reading the more sour reports one might wonder why he put himself through all the trouble. Bowles obviously relished his role as the cultural outsider, and enjoyed writing about drugs, sex, and traditions the West found taboo. The people he describes are individuals, sketched boldly and without reserve. A trip to Ketama, "the kif center of all North Africa," becomes a chance to provide an extensive description of Morocco's drug culture.

His willingness to describe the whole of his experience makes Bowles's writing more than mere reporting -- from an unexpected swarm of flies, to the unrelenting sun, to the cool desert night and the noisy neighbors in an overcrowded hotel. He was blunt about writing these pieces for pay (and published in American travel magazines) but the result remains an engaging and entertaining collection.

Reprint of 1957 collection of eight travel essays by the well-known novelist. Though they include pieces on modern Sri Lanka, Turkey and South America, the book is at its most insightful in North Africa, where Bowles has lived a great deal of his life. While the book is not really about religion, despite the suggestive nature of the subtitle, it is in most ways about different modes of spirituality and belief. Whether this involves hexes, the spirits of animals, the solitude of the desert, Bowles is attempting to present an alternative vision. Some of the language and indeed the attitudes he takes could be considered very dated by today's standards, and some of the writing borders on whining about poor conditions. But the essays are still valuable for their portraits of newly independent countries struggling with their identities. His glib generalizations on the relative merits and effects of narcotic vs. those of alcohol are somewhat silly, as are some of his observations on nationalism and cultural tradition. But, each piece is a quick read, and well worth it if you have any interest in the areas written about.

Unable to write a review of the above title; the book was given to someone as a gift. The book was chosen because the author is a favorite of the person who received it.

Bought as a gift. Have not read it, though I will eventually