Paul Bowles was a great writer who also did us the service of translating many Morroccan writings. One of these writers is Mohammed Mrabet. This little title Mhashish was put out by the City Lights label many years ago. It contains tales largely revolving around the use of kif (or hashish as Americans would call it) It is a delightful collection of tales. Mrabet is a talented writer. He draws up some tantalizing tales that delve into the positive and negative of this state of mind. It is a good introductory volume for the novice (admittedly I am a novice myself) of Morroccan literature. Mr Bowles did us a great favor in translating numerous works by Mrabet. Let us pray to Allah that City Lights finds it in their hearts to reissue these fine collections of exotic literature.

Mrabet teeters like an innocent child on the edge of paranoia and madness. These disturbed visions, bubbling up from the very hashish inspired dreams that Mrabet describes, provide insight into the bizarre world of Tangier and the Rif mountains where western values merge in an unsettling medley with ancient Berber traditions anchored in superstition, hallucination, and deceit. Bowles and his intrinsic understanding of this bizarre culture have brought us a most valuable translation that otherwise might never have reached western minds.

Bowles' autobiography "Without Stopping" has been referred to as "Without Telling" by Burroughs. Invisible Spectator follows it step-by-step, especially with regard to the early years. Additions to what Bowles fans want to know are largely limited to some speculations about Mr. Bowles' sexual relationships and a bits of new information from letters, interviews, and obscure publications. Historical context should have been provided given that Mr. Bowles was born in 1910, almost ninety years ago.

The last few decades are glossed over, especially considering the blow-by-blow account of the early years of career-building and travel. Again, these events are known largely from Mr. Bowles' autobiography and Invisible Spectator adds little. Little light is shed on the later years after Mrs. Bowles' death in the 1970s. These years have been highly productive for the subject, and much more interesting to this reader than the virtually prehistoric youth of Mr. Bowles. From the Beats on, the biography serves up the skimpiest information. If you have never read anything about Paul Bowles you will be entranced as his life is fascinating. If you have, there's little new here. The author is a fan, and a biography by a detractor would be much more fun. Regardless, cheers to Mr. Paul Bowles for letting the biographer have access to personal information. I wish he had done a more interesting job with it.

Paul Bowles lived in Morocco for a reason, he embraced the mystery of it,perhaps enjoyed losing his western self in it, and there is no solving in any easy rational way the mystery that is Paul Bowles. But this is a great gathering of the known facts. I appreciate the lack of speculation and reading into things ....the author allows you to accompany him through this life decade by decade, sticking to what is known. And Bowles, however good your guide, remains a territory for the most part unknown.
It may be worthwhile to compare this to Paul Bowles own autobiography Without Stopping published in early seventies.
In this biography you get a picture of Paul as a child, as well as a restless young man who cannot resist the call to Europe. You get Paul as composer of numerous film scores, poems, and a general idea of this middle period before that better known period as writer marked by the publication of that first book Sheltering Sky. Also there is an interesting portrait of Jane, his talented and troubled wife. And a picture of Paul at work with his protege Mohammed Mrabet whose oral tales he transcribed(including:Love With a Few Hairs, Lemon, Boy Who Caught Fire, others). This will give you a very good idea of Paul as glimpsed by an outsider as it is a competent and readable dossier of facts and dates. There are more speculative works about Paul Bowles available but really I think the fiction is the place to go. There you will find the most interesting Bowles, the composer of tales and mysteries, even riddles of what it is to be human. The story of Paul's life is interesting and perhaps it will help some who like to interpret stories with the support of biographical data but ultimately the facts in this case anyway do not go very far.

Provocative. Daring. A voice that electrifies. Yet, the book has to be seen in a wider lens. It is and isn't about Central America. It, might be, about writers in actual times, in a globalize world. The way to go farther than a sylable. It is also a begginer's work. It is an experimental text. The main idea is far stronger than the ending. The reading is recommended. Rey Rosa is at the moment the best Guatemala has to offer.

Reading The Pelcari project led me to read everything available by Rodrigo Rey Rosa; I am comfortable recommending any and all of his works.

The Pelcari Project is an interesting study of human individuality and social engineering ... both provocative and frightening in its social implications. Think of the tale as a cautionary tale of the behavioral scientist/neurosurgeon gone mad.

Of all the third-world writers Paul Bowles translated, Mohammed Mrabet enjoyed the most success-- perhaps because he managed to stay on Bowles' good side the longest. But Mrabet also has an amazingly fertile imagination that surpassed Bowles' at times. He can seemlessly incorporate elements of Western narrative innovations into his work, as he proves with The Big Mirror. Much like Mrabet's other novels and collections of stories, it's a portrait of Morocco in the 60's and 70's that's grounded in ancient ritual and myth, but in this case Mrabet seems to have tackled feelings of doom and anxiety and horror much more openly than ever before. This is the most "Western" of Mrabet's work, I would say, and perhaps also the most powerful because it so clearly walks the tightrope between cultures, between times, between logic and the inexplicable, between brutality and love. It's chilling and surreal as Jim Thompson's novel Savage Night or the juicy parts of Potocki's The Manuscript Found in Saragossa.
I'm telling you, track this one down.

The Boy Who Set the Fire is a curious collection of stories taped and translated by Paul Bowles. The author, Mohammed Mrabet, is an oral storyteller but not necessarily traditional. I would have appreciated knowing which, if any, of the stories are traditional.

Perhaps the most powerful story is "What Happened in Granada" which revolves around the disrespect of the English family running a hotel for the Moroccan driver of a man who had left his ill wife in their care. The story does an excellent job of showing the misunderstandings that can led to mistreatment.

The flip side is "The Woman from New York" where a Moroccan shows his mistrust of the American woman and the hippies (I'm assuming based upon the date of the story); their manner of living causes the Moroccan to consider them sickly, dirty and slanderous.

Some of the stories are humorous. "Doctor Safi" tells the story of a man who pulls his donkey's rotten teeth. From that he concludes he'd do well with a dental practice (human and animal). A few successes there and he fancies himself a doctor. "The Saint By Accident" follows a similar humorous path with the misunderstandings on the part of the viewers not the "saint".

Several stories deal with illness brought on by sinister powers and cured only by what we would consider religious magic e.g. "The Well". Others are stories of revenge, e.g. "The Boy Who Set the Fire".

The constants across the stories include a preference for the older, rural life style; the ever-present kif; conflict between Muslim and Nazarene. The book provides an interesting insight into the culture of the author and, as such, is well worth reading.

This book details the encounters of Choukri with Jean Genet in Tangier over a short period of time. The prose describing the encounters and the selection of details to include in the description is masterful - in a slim volume one gains both a feeling of Morocco's bureaucrats, of the author's respect for Genet and of Genet himself. There is no hint of "gossip column" or "me with a big shot" - both of which are dangers for this type of writing. This is book is well worth your time.

Paul Bowles was always a unique writer. An expatriate American who went to Morrocco and stayed. Midnight Mass is a collection of his short stories written after 1976. It is a great companion piece to his Collected Stories which gathers his stories prior to 1976. Bowles can be difficult to read because he became so emmershed in Morroccan culture it is quite, shall we say, foreign to Western readers. This is not the writing of an American. Paul Bowles became like a Morroccan in his years in Tangier. If you want to learn a little about Morroccan culture this is a good place to start. Stories like The Eye and Madame and Ahmed hit the mark. It is, overall, an outstanding collection. It is great for lovers of literature in general as well as for Morroccan neophytes.

I have to agree with another reviewer, I didn't think it was a radical new direction for biography either... I'm not even done with the book yet and I'm still waiting for Ms. Dillon to begin shifting the focus of her investigations away from herself and Jane Bowles.
Right now I'm thinking that perhaps I'd prefer reading The Invisible Spectator by Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno. Maybe that would be a better portrait of Mr. Bowles...

Just finished the book. Fascinating in its detail about Bowles' life in North Africa. But, a new form of biography? No, I don't think so. Rather, a series of extended interviews with Dillon's highly subjective and personal analytical apparatus attached to them. Or, simply a memoir. I think there is a great danger of loss of perspective when a writer admires his / her subject too much, as well as admiring too much his / her relationship with the subject. I had this uncanny feeling all throughout the book that Bowles, as he did with other people he knew, was stringing Dillon along, knowing he could hand here just about anything for posterity. The photograph on the back fold of the dust jacket speaks volumes, as Dillon gazes in what looks like rapture upon an apparently inert Bowles. He wasn't that good of a writer. And, I disagree with both of them. Sheltering Sky was a fine film....

Yes, read this book. I liked it because I felt I was in this exotic, strangely present yet distant place, with Paul & Millicent Dillon. And also Jane. Maybe you know what I mean if you like Paul Bowles.

This is a loving book. It is a pleasant place to be -- with elements of disturbance, as you would expect. It is an addition to what you already have.

Well, I had high hopes for this. The summary on the back sounded very interesting, but it ended up being rather boring. It seemed like the author was trying to write poetry in prose form. The idea was kind of cool, but it really lacked something. Parts of the different descriptions were intriguing, but in the end it left you wondering exactly what happened. I know it was about "True" life in Guatemala, but that's it. Some ideas were worth pondering and I recommend this for a suicidal college poet, but not anyone else.

"Set in Guatemala, these spare and beautiful tales are linked by themes of magic, violence, and the fragility of existence. Paul Bowles' translation perfectly captures Rey Rosa's stories of the haunted lives of ordinary people in present-day Central America."

Cherie Nutting somehow attached herself to Paul Bowles and took lots of photographs. Many of these are of herself in various gauzy poses. We also get the inside story in the form of her dreamlife. "Memoir" indeed, but who cares? What does all this have to do with Paul Bowles, especially the version that created the books and music? Toward the end of this volume we realize how lonely and confused Mr. Bowles was, and how ripe for an opportunistic Ms. Nutting. I don't know exactly what to call this thing, but the Bowles name would more correctly appear in it as a footnote.

Paul Bowles' collaboration with the photographer Cherie Nutting was a very special endeavor. It was his last writing before his death in November 1999. This hardcover book is beautifully produced, and Mr. Bowles himself actually handwrote some of the text and wholeheartedly participated in it. He relied on the artistic ability of his friend to produce--over a period of many years--such quality photos of himself and those around him. This is a 'must have' book for any afficionado of Paul Bowles. I highly recommend it. It is inconceivable to me why anyone would write a negative review, but perhaps those are the unfortunate and jealous souls who were not included.

This is an untypical book about an untypical person. Just as the photographs of the Western and Southwestern landscape by Ansel Adams evoke the majesty of nature, so do the photographs of Cherie Nutting well represent the life and surroundings of the author Paul Bowles. The Bowles mystique is spread throughout the land. Here in Chicago respected Tribune columnist Jon Anderson and political and real estate consultant Phil Krone were among Bowles' friends and admirers. In a sense Nutting's volume pierces through the myth that Bowles was a reclusive hermit. In fact he was a very social and convivial man who balanced his life between the discipline of hard work that any craft requires, and the conduct of life as a traveler, not only through geography but minds as well. In a very lighthearted and elegiac way this is what Ms. Nutting captures.