The Delicate Prey (Paperback)

by Paul Bowles (Author) "When old Senora Sanchez died, her two daughters Lucha and Chalia decided to visit their brother at his ranch..." (more)
Key Phrases: pastor dowe, circular valley, little envelopes, Don Anastasio, Don Federico, Orange Walk (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Paul Bowles once said that a story should remain taut throughout, like a piece of string. That tense, stretched tone is the key to this collection of 17 eerie tales by the author best known for The Sheltering Sky. The Delicate Prey is dedicated: "For my mother, who first read me the stories of Poe." If Poe had lived in Mexico, and he'd had ice water running in his veins to counteract his feverish romanticism, he might have crafted something like these odd vignettes about human frailty and cruelty. The setting is a world where palm trees are like "shiny green spiders," where bats reel silently overhead in a jet-black sky, where a hot, relentless wind blows across deserted plazas.

As Tobias Wolff writes in Esquire, "The Delicate Prey is in fact one of the most profound, beautifully wrought, and haunting collections in our literature.... Bowles's tales are at once austere, witty, violent, and sensuous. They move with the inevitability of myth. His language has a purity of line, a poise and authority entirely its own, capable of instantly modulating from farce to horror without a ruffle."

Review
"Paul Bowles has opened the world of Hip. He let in the murder, the drugs, the incest, the death of the Square...the call of the orgy, the end of civilization."--Norman Mailer""The Delicate Prey" is in fact one of the most profound, beautifully wrought, and haunting collections in our literature, ...Bowles's tales are at once austere, witty, violent, and sensuous. They move with the inevitability of myth. His language has a purity of line, a pise and authority entirely its own, capable of instantly modulating from farce to horror without a ruffle and without giving any signal of delight in itself. It never goes on parade."--Tobia Wolff, "Esquire""Paul Bowles's sense of what can go wrong is as acute as that of any American writer since Poe. It's not simply the subject matter but the pitiless clarity, the unblinking regard in the face of human frailty and cruelty, that is so disquieting in Bowles's work. Whereas the terror in Poe seems to arise from an overheated romantic imagination suffering the torments it bodies forth, Bowles's sensibility is calssical in is aloofness, his prose as hard-edged and dazzling as a desert landscape at noon."--Jay McInerney, "Vanity Fair"

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (November 1, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0880012633
• ISBN-13: 978-0880012638
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.7 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,033,209 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #27 in

  Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( B ) > Bowles, Paul

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Stunning Collection!, May 23, 2000

By	"k-sauce" (Sacramento, CA) - See all my reviews

This is a must-read for anyone interested in 20th century American literature. An absolutely stunning collection of tales that provoke, disturb and intoxicate the reader. Bowles writes in a style that is almost clinical: dry, precise and elegant, which accentuates the horrors he describes all the more. Hailed by such writers and Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer as a modern classic, you should not fail to read it if you have not already done so. And if enjoyed this title, check out The Sheltering Sky and Let it Come Down.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Post Colonial Blues, June 21, 2006

By	Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

DP contains most of Bowles' classic gems, and it provides a good introduction to the kind of thing you will be encountering when you get old enough to take on THE SHELTERING SKY and LET IT COME DOWN. A musician by training, he took on writing as a sort of hobby, then became obssessed with it to the negkect of his music, as he relates in his breezy, atypical memoir WITHOUT STOPPING, written much later in life when he had attained a sort of Buddha-like, or Burroughs-like I don;'t care attitude about the things that had troubled him earlier. When this book first appeared it must have been one tremendous shock after another, and a few of the stories still carry an explosive charge.

One of the best tales seems to be an allegory of Bowles' progress from music to writing. In A DISTANT EPISODE, a professor of music gets abducted by desert bandits who remove his tongue and "train" him into becoming a dancing clown, like a monkey owned by a hurdy-gurdy man. They exhibit him widely, and his brain is so badly damaged that he is content with his retardation, knowing only the blows of his captors, until one afternoon when he accidentally hears some bars of Western music. He starts to cry and bawl his head off, he knows not why. It is a thoroughly repulsive story, but it displays beautifully the ambiguity with which Bowles viewed his long-ago music career, which he must after awhile have remembered only through a thousand veils.

PAGES FROM COLD POINT is pretty stronr too, not to say ripe. In Belize in the Caribbean, a wealthy American gay man comes to stay in a seaside mansion with his 16 year old son, Racky, the apple of his eye. What he doesn't know is that Racky is the bad seed incarnate, like a male Lolita, sex in dungarees. Racky enjoys going to every man and boy on the island, black or white, and seducing them, for he is so lovely no one would say no to him. Eventually the elders and the women decide to put the hammer down and warn the dad to take his slutty boy off the island or trouble will ensue. You won't believe what happens next, but it is worthy of a great porn movie. Radley Metzger might have made you believe it, but for Paul Bowles it was just another day in the life.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outside Civilizations Walls, August 28, 2001

By	Doug Anderson (Miami Beach, Florida United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

"Delicate Prey", the title story, is one of the most memorable stories I've ever encountered. This story of a young flute player and his uncles who are Arab traders crossing a remote desert region begins innocently enough but soon a stranger appears on the horizon who comes closer and closer. This desert episode is told with a perfect accumulation of atmospheric detail and just the barest amount of human detail to place this tale in the realm of myth. The tale involves many things that will later appear in Bowles' other short fictions including hashish and flute music and other things that will go unmentioned so as not to spoil their discovery by new readers. "At Paso Rojo" is a story set in South America on a ranch. There two sisters go after their mothers death to live with their brother. As the sisters settle in one sister especially decides she wants to live a freer life than women in the cities are allowed to live and she begins to allow herself liberties that shock her more conservative sister. As she rides through the wild jungle her horse bolts and the sensations she has impart to the reader that hers is no ordinary psychology. Used to suppressing her sexuality while her mother was alive she begins to explore her power as a woman and as events unfold we see that this power has sprouted something in her that cannot be mistaken for anything but pure evil. Every story in this collection presents striking locales and lurid acts. The appeal of them is partly in the exoticism of the locales and partly in the allure of the lurid. Bowles aesthetic is a strange one but his tales could not be delivered with any more force. The collection is dedicated to Poe, and appropriately so, but the depth of the psychological examination of different kinds of pathologies lend these stories a power that magnifies their effect beyond mere horror stories. They are stories of modern psyches with the superficial but protective veneer of civilization removed.