This book illustrates why City Lights Books is the most important tourist stop in San Francisco - they are the publishers of this excellent book. The Andalusian poet is a contemporary of Lorca, Dali etc. In his brief autobiographic note, he states that these poems were written at night in a frenzy. I believe him. At least three-quarters of the poems have a sense of being inspired rather than crafted i.e. as if they came as whole to the poet, i.e. as if they came directly from within as an expression of state-of-being rather than being created consciously by the artistic intellect.

Within the poems there is a significant variety in structure and tone although most share a sense of disorientation. There are very inventive images which absolutely fit in the poem although standing alone, that seems impossible. Throughout the poems there was only one image that jarred, one (to my mind) misplaced "piano". Some examples: "Ah yes. A suit of clothes went by / uninhabited, hollow" or "The earth was an enemy, / because it fled. / The sky an enemy, / because it never stopped."

This volume is bilingual - something I appreciate (or demand) in translations of poetry. It is a volume that bears reading and rereading in either or both languages.

More broadly, this is a tale of two countries: France and America, and how artists are perceived in each.

American expatriates living in France, especially Paris, between the great wars, are well known - Hemingway, Pound, Wolfe, Stein, Miller, Fitzgerald, Cummings, Elliot - just to name a few. What is not as well known or realized is that the exodus continued well into the '60s with Black writers Wright, Baldwin, and Himes, with the Beats, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Corso, Burroughs, with mainstream writers, James Jones, Irwin Shaw, Terry Southern, and William Styron, and with academics such as W.H. Auden, Ashbery, Mathews, Brion Gysin, and many many others. What brought them all to France, especially Paris?

Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno's account of American expatriates in France reads like a novel. He enters the minds and hearts of the various authors - their inner thoughts and motivations - in a seemingly effortless narrative, drawing on a vast scholarship. He has read all of their works and letters as well as news and magazine articles of the times. Gertrude Stein was thought to be peculiarly anti-semitic as she sided with the Vichy government, the irascible Hemingway had a vendetta against James Jones (author of *From Here to Eternity*) and Richard Wright noted that "I've learned more about America in one month in Paris than I could in one year in New York." In addition to chronicling little-known facts and anecdotes about the first wave, the author continues the saga with later writers.

He covers all kinds of writing. A most interesting chapter deals with an obscure (in America) experimental French author, Roussel, and the American writers influenced by him - Ashbery, Mathews, Burroughs, Koch. They reinvented what the Dadaists had begun 40 years earlier, a turning of images in cinematic variation, a "systematic derangement of the senses."

Paris is "artistically electric" they agree. Racial prejudice isn't a factor in France (except for the French treatment of the Algerians) but only Baldwin seems to have been upset by this. Where but in France could Ferlinghetti wander into a cafe and find a paper tablecloth with a poem written on it, (signed by Jacques Prevert). "For Ferlinghetti, this was the France of which the legends had been made. On leaving the cafe, he took the tablecloth with him. The incident was prophetic. Fourteen years later, City Lights [in San Francisco] would issue Ferlinghetti's translation of Prevert's 'Paroles'".

Where but in France would landlords lower the rent when they discovered that their tenants were writers or artists? "In short," says this author, "Paris empowered, granted permission to be an artist in a way the United States never had. In the accounts of almost all of the writers profiled in this book, Paris was equated with artistic freedom, with the ability to experiment, to succeed, even to fail, without feeling oneself to be a social deviant [while] In America, they felt, one was more often measured by how financially successful one was, not by what one actually did. Status accrued to those who made money, and the writer, generally not so able to generate an enviable income, was rarely accorded a position of importance in the eyes of the general public."

Said Ginsberg, "You can't escape the past in Paris, and yet what's so wonderful about it is that the past and present intermingle so intangibly that it doesn't seem a burden." Indeed, Paris allowed "la grande permission" for writers "to work out their own aesthetic directions without being unduly swayed by convention, anti-convention or fashion."

This is not, in my opinion, one of those books that you can't put down. There is so much material here to digest and ponder. But if you're interested in the subject, even though it may take you weeks or even months, you will keep picking it up. The only question I have on finishing it is - the continual pilgrimage -is it still continuing? And if not, why not?

pamhan99@aol.com

The Polpo Vuh is also written by the Maya of Ancient America. It predates the Chilam Balam series by at least 4,000 years. This is written as a correction to the previous reviewers notes on the Chilam Balam. It is important to purchase these books while they are available to us, the American Aboriginal from any part of the Americas while there is peace. None of the California Public librarys carry any of our ancient texts as they still marginalize our needs. You can always get Ancient Classical Greek works in public librarys across the country and anything from across the ocean but our own American original pieces are not made available to us still. So, if you can please purchase these books, and the Popol Vuh and donate them to your public librarys while we still have a chance to recover from the on going conquest.

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.