This is a fantastic book, Mrabet is a master story teller. His lines are raw and simple, chisled directly into the paper. At times the style reminded me of Hemmingway. His works have been confused with Paul Bowles own before (a credit to Mrabet's own genious), mainly because of the content with its tales of swift, brutal violence,exotic enviroments, and bizarre imagination. Mrabet,though, is far more influenced by traditional Moroccan folk lore. This book is Mrabet's autobiograghy as told to Bowles. Every fan of Paul or Jane Bowles will want to check it out because it involves his job as servant to the couple. We get to see their relationship through his own eyes. Most of the epiosodes in his life involve robbing ,manipulating, and conning rich american tourists. Theirs also a great deal of Moroccan superstitions, magic, poisons, witchcraft, and plenty of other real life adventures into the under-belly of Moroccan culture. A valuble and fancinating take on a world and way of thinking us westerner's will never get the chance to experience.

This book will be viewed by photographers and art lovers as a magnificent picture book, by travelers as a journey into the grace of Morocco, by architects as a model for design. This book made a trip to Morocco inevitable, and served as a reminder of the beauty of the country.

A fabulous book of photographs that show Morocco through the lens of Paul Bowles. Like a photo essay of Bowles's life in the desert, it shows his literary, erotic, and visual obsessions. Images of Jane are particularly cryptic.

Hibbard's book on the study of the short fiction of Paul Bowles is easily the best that is available on the subject, and Hibbard covers just about everything that the reader would want to know.

The book is split into 3 sections: 1) The Short Fiction 2) The Writer and 3) The Critics. There are also many interviews with Bowles in this book, as well as many critical essays.

The main books covered are: 'The Delicate Prey', 'A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard', 'The Time of Friendship', 'Things Gone and Things Still Here', 'Midnight Mass' and 'Unwelcome Words and other stories'.

I recommend this book to any serious student of the fiction of Paul Bowles, as well as the casual reader, because this book is written in a readily understandable format, which in itself is very useful.

A short novel of stunning concision -- liberating his work from the millstone of fixed character POV or time, Bowles jumps between vastly different ages (while maintaining his chosen setting: North Africa) with breathtaking fluency and a near- total disregard for realist conventions. This short novel, acclaimed by many as a masterpiece, ought to have inspired a revolution in storytelling: it is as explosive, in its own way, as Breton's *Nadja*. Instead, it simply sank from view. Some of the sections are only as long as a paragraph; others are bona fide short stories. But what endures in the mind is the way that Bowles' writing shifts, as if by magic, into the most voluptuous shapes.

The gap in understanding between cultures, a theme of "The Sheltering Sky," is dramatized with brutal honesty in this novel set in Fez, Morocco during a 1954 nationalist uprising. Totally relevant to today's political situation in the Middle East and elsewhere, richly descriptive of its setting, and uncompromising in its characterizations

It may be an anachronism, but Paul Bowles' THE SPIDER'S HOUSE can best be characterized as a "post-political" novel par excellence. Nearly 50 years after its publication, it is nothing short of prophetic in both tone and content. The meaning of the book unfolds ironically from the epigraph, taken from the Q'uran: "The likeness of those who choose other patrons than Allah is as the likeness of the spider when she taketh unto herself a house, and lo! the frailest of all houses is the spider's house, if they but knew."

The novel portrays the last days of French rule in Morocco through the eyes of an American expat writer on the one hand and an illiterate Arab boy on the other. Stenham, the American, is in love with the past -- alive all around him, he believes, in the "medieval" streets of 20th century Fez. The Moroccans, or the "Moslems" as Stenham refers to them (with purpose), both attract and exasperate him with their fatalism (Mektoub, "it is written") and dogmatic faith in their God and their traditions. Stenham can affirm none of these things intellectually yet he envies the Moslems, if only because he yearns for such psychological comfort himself. In his unbelief ("It did not really matter whether they worshipped Allah or carburetors -- they were lost in any case"), Stenham also finds their medieval path superior because its aesthetic qualities appeal to him. The ugliness of the modern world, in both its Western and Soviet guises, pains him. Contemplating the factories and housing projects of the French colony, Stenham observes that the capitalist landscape looks no different from the communist one: "After all, he reflected, Communisim was merely a more virulent form of the same disease that was everywhere in the world. The world was indivisible and homogeneous; what happened in one place happened in another, political protestations to the contrary."

In the character of Amar, Bowles reveals Morocco through Moslem eyes. Here is where Bowles really shines. He doesn't tell, he shows: the unmistakable sign of a great writer. Unlike Stenham, Amar is comfortable in the world -- at least when we first meet him. There are believers and there are unbelievers. The certainty of this division and what it means forms the bedrock of Amar's identity. The French, or "Nazarenes" (Christians), are the enemies of the believers. The duty of the believer is to fight the unbeliever to the death. But when Amar crosses paths with members of the Istiqlal, the Moroccan nationalists, his certainties are shaken. Amar learns that the Istiqlal, like all political movements, uses religion for more worldly ends.

For Amar and Stenham, the promise of a political solution to human suffering (physical or existential) proves empty. Amar cannot reconcile the behavior of the Istiqlal -- killing fellow Moslems for political reasons -- to his faith, and he struggles with the idea that they are not the "purely defensive group of selfless martyrs" that he needs them to be. Stenham also hates the nationalists, but for different reasons. So long as he is comfortably outside the system, Stenham prefers Islam to modernization. As a former communist, he sees that the real enemies are the do-gooders and busybodies from the West preaching liberalism and communism. These are represented by the character of Polly Burroughs. "Hers was the attitude of the missionary," Stenham observes, "but whereas the missionary offers a complete if unusable code of thought, the modernizer offered nothing at all, save a place in the ranks. And the Moslems...now were going to be duped into joining the senseless march of universal brotherhood; for the privilege each man would give up only a small part of himself -- just enough to make him incomplete, so that instead of looking into his own heart, to Allah, for reassurance, he would have to look to others. The new world would be a triumph of frustration, where all humanity would be lifting itself by its own bootstraps -- the equality of the damned."

This book is not for the timid and it is a far more satisfying and mature work than the SHELTERING SKY. Bowles captures an unforgettable meeting between East and West. There is no "clash of civilizations", but neither is there the happy ending mandated by current liberal-multicultural fantasies. Written before the age of political correctness, THE SPIDER'S HOUSE offers a sympathetic yet honest -- and therefore disturbing -- view of Islam. But honest readers should also be disturbed by our own Western pieties. "Happy is the man who believes he is happy," says Stenham, "...and more accursed than the murderer is the man who works to destroy that belief."

Reading "The Spider's House" was a bittersweet experience for me. Because I have already read his other novels and since his passing last November, I knew this would be it. There would be little more than rereading the passages I have bookmarked and concentrating on his short stories. I truly love Bowles' style of writing and this novel IS far better than the others. Yes, I loved "The Sheltering Sky" as most others do, but that was merely from the P.O.V. of outsiders, 'travelers' if you will. "The Spider's House" also shares that P.O.V., but it also provides that of a young Moslem boy and an expatriot who has lived in the region for many years. Their perceptions of one another are approached in such a way that the reader understands their motives/actions, though the characters do not necessarily understand one another. Politics and religion play a large part in facilitating those perceptions and makes for an exciting read.

I highly recommend this novel for anyone who: - liked the other works of Bowles and/or - enjoys stories involving religion/politics/exotic places/romance (Those fond of the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez will especially like this one)

The beginning of this book moves quite slowly, and when it picks up in pace, it picks up only a little. I even found the writing tedious at first, though it became quite wonderful by the end. It isn't a page turner for sure, but still I found myself slowly moving from bored to being very interested in the characters to being completely swallowed by the story and unaware of the world outside the novel.

The book is about a couple, Port and Kit, and their friend Tunner. They are travelling in the Sahara Desert, far from their familiar culture. Things happen to them which compose the story, but the novel is great because it captures the tension in the relationships between people. Nobody seems to be able to understand the others, and each of the three characters are in some ways as foreign to each other as they are to their surroundings. Eventually, Kit emerges as the main character, unable to comprehend her identity in a place that has stripped her of the sureness of her existence. In a sense, she loses her post-War American psychological angst, and becomes immersed in the more basic anguish of fear and surrender. Finishing the book is like waking from a bad dream.

The scope of Paul Bowles' *The Sheltering Sky* is two-fold: on the outside it is the tale of three young Americans traveling around North Africa after the World War. In a deeper level it is really a terrifying, exhilarating journey into the depth of human existence. Kit and Port Moresby's marriage was jeopardized. They came to the desert to escape from civilization, to escape from one another. The couple had never settled down in any one place, but rather they casually intended to move from one place to another in Africa in order to avoid places that had been touched by wars. The couple was also joined by a mutual friend Tunner and with whom emarked on a journey into the forbidden Sahara. What this book strikes me the most is the way Bowles examines the ways in which Americans apprehend an alien culture (as well as alien land). The very same apprehension at the end in a sense destroyed these Americans. As they emarked on their journey, further and further away from civilization, we can see how the cultural superiority of these fellow Americans dominate their thoughts-how they not trust the locals, the Arabs, the porters of town, the butler at inns. The journey forced these Americans to push the limits of human life. Each one of them was touched by the unspeakableemptiness and impassive cruelty of the desert. I don't want to give away the ending of the tale but this is definitely not a page-turner as you, the reader, will have to emark yourself on this journey and think about the limits of human reason and intelligence, about the powerlessness in controlling our fate. Beautiful prose, challenging reading. 4.2 stars.

Shortly after Paul Bowles arrived in Morocco in July, 1947, he began writing "The Sheltering Sky" in the stuffy air of a claustrophobic hotel room in Fez. "The first page had to be part of the airless little hotel room where I was lying." From this inauspicious, but atmospheric, beginning, Bowles created one of the most profound works of Twentieth Century American literature, a deeply disturbing exploration of interiority and the world, of the relationship between mind and culture.

"The Sheltering Sky" tells the story of three Americans traveling in the Sahara following the Second World War. Port and Kit Moresby, husband and wife, and their friend, Tunner, are "travelers," not "tourists," as Port says early in the narrative. "The difference is partly one of time . . . Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another." Like travelers, Port, Kit and Tunner seem to have little in the way of an itinerary, their days languourously slipping by, one day into the next, without purpose, marked only by a palpable psychic discomfort.

But there is another important difference between the tourist and the traveler. As Port relates, "the former accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with the others, and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking." In doing this, however, the traveler runs the risk, if the degree of cultural separation is too great, if the foreign culture is too extreme, that he will become completely untethered from reality. As Bowles once said in a 1981 Paris Review interview: "Everyone is isolated from everyone else. The concept of society is like a cushion to protect us from the knowledge of that isolation. A fiction that serves as an anaesthetic."

It is, ultimately, the removal of this anaesthetic, the removal of societal and cultural moorings, which drives the narrative of "The Sheltering Sky"and determines the fate of Port and Kit and Tunner. One does not survive; another will never be the same again. Disturbances of the interior landscape, the landscape of the psyche, become the catalyst of this psychologically discomforting novel. And this stunning mingling of interior landscape with the landscape of the Sahara-the sands, the sky, the maze-like passages of the cities, the alien culture-brilliantly unfies and completes the narrative of "The Sheltering Sky", marking it as a profound and compelling work of genius.

An exotic locale. An American couple with marital problems. A mysterious death. A friendship with a strange local couple. Sex. Drugs. Death. Very strange. Very well-crafted. Very good book. Very Bowles.

The first 100 pages of Up Above The World follows the travelings of Taylor and Day two Americans very reminiscent of Port and Kit of Sheltering Sky. In the last 150 pages after meeting a strange couple Taylor and Day are no longer in control of their lives but prisoners of the strange couple. Exactly how this imprisoning takes place and for what reasons only become clear in the very last pages. Only a minimal plot description can be given as the pleasure is in finding things out in the order they are meant to be found out. Having been a longtime fan of Sheltering Sky and all of his stories I hesitated reading any of his other novels as I heard they were not as good as his first. But reading this I find I am reminded not so much of the eerie and desolate majesty of Sheltering Sky which is a far better novel but of Bowles short stories, especially the ones which take place in South America as this novel does. This is not Sheltering Sky caliber fiction but it is a very competent novel and will appeal to those who admire Bowles very modern and often horrific short stories full of deviant psychologies and drugs and all sorts of sordid and often primitive "truths" about human nature. The novel reads like an extended short story really. Occasional details peculiar for being so precise stand out as always in Bowles writing. He describes the sound a cricket makes as coming from the back of its black throat. The Bowles vision is as bleak a vision as exists in serious modern fiction but it is immensely appealing as gothic things often are. I doubt many people really feel the world is as Bowles describes it. He grasps at only one side of human nature, the side the sun never reaches. Not a place you want to live but an intriguing place to travel through.

Bowles' work is not for the squeamish or the weak-minded. He knew that. He wrote for those of us capable of understanding and accepting the base nature of man and dealing with it in an intellectual capacity. This is a great work of literature for those intelligent enough, tough enough and honest enough to comprehend the big picture. The ideas may be harsh, but the storytelling is so eloquent and the conjuring of imagery creates such beautiful pictures in the mind amongst the psychological and physical carnage that it demands to be read. This is a GREAT work. It takes a Graham Greene vibe and extrapolates it in an admirably frightening way. READ THIS BOOK! Paul Bowles is one of the five greatest writers of the 20th century. Read him.

Long after the expatriate American writer ceased to be a phenomenon in the 20th century, Paul Bowles, composer and writer, lived on in Tangier, Morocco, until his death just a couple of years ago at age 88. DAYS is a journal he kept at the request of the editor of a literary journal that was in the late 1980's planning a theme issue based on personal journals and notebooks. Bowles was not a diarist, and his first entries reflect his lack of purpose or investment in the form. The entries are not daily by any means or particularly long, but once he gets into it, his product is fascinating. He has a flair for nailing a scene or a mood in a quick sketch. Some may wish to read this for the glimpses of his well-known friends and visitors and his perspective of such social events as a Malcolm Forbes' party. I found the picture of contemporary Muslim-controlled Tangier to be striking. This was written from 1987 - 1989 during which time Salmon Rushdie's SATANIC VERSES was published and a friend of Bowles rather thoughtlessly sent him a copy which the mail inspectors confiscated, which put him in the line of fire for a time. It was also the period when Bertolucci began the process of filming Bowles' novel, THE SHELTERING SKY.

I have to admit, I came to this book knowing next to nothing about Bowles. I had hoped it would be more of a travelogue, or something like Steinbeck's working journals, and it was neither. On the other hand, I was intrigued enough to want to learn more about Bowles, to read his work, and to be sorry that the journal ends abruptly. I realized that given his reports of the stream of photographers, interviewers, would-be biographers, aritsts, celebrities and strangers who came to his door like pilgrims, that he was someone of consequence in our visitable past, and I'm sorry I was not more aware when he was alive. For those who share my ignorance of the man, there is an informative short biography...

I picked this volume up because of the references to the Guatemalan writer Rodrigo Rey Rosa; I am very fond of his work. I found items of far greater interest in the day to day activities of Paul Bowles. The challenges of censored mail, time disconnects (e.g. cafe closed when filming is supposed occuring), of ill-tempered fasters during Ramadan, and business concerns (copyrights, translators, contracts ...) make for interesting observations in the hand of Paul Bowles. If you have any interest in Bowles, Mrabet or Rosa, this book is worth your time.

Paul Bowles has been of interest to me ever since I read THE SHELTERING SKY so many years ago. Now with DAYS: TANGIER JOURNAL, the reader gets a behind-the-scenes of one of the most enigmatic writers of the twentieth century. The landscape and people of Tangier, Morocco are expertly painted in all their mysterious charm as Bowles simultaneously deflates and expands upon his own legend. If you are interested in Bowles, this book is a must read for the insight that it gives, insights not necessarily illuminated upon in the average Bowles biography or documentary. Bowles is self-effacing but his contribution to fiction is huge, and this book is like looking through a door, cracked half-open, at the man himself in all his many facets. Morocco itself also figures large in Bowles' art, and the reader gets a real taste of that exotic locale with all its danger and N. African wonder.

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.

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.

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.