Paul Bowles
Personal Information
Description
Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 – November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. He became associated with Tangier, where he settled in 1947 and lived for 52 years to the end of his life. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making several trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with his first novel The Sheltering Sky (1949), set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, at that time in the Tangier International Zone, and his wife Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was Bowles' home for the remainder of his life. He came to symbolize American immigrants in the city. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried near family graves in Lakemont Cemetery, in upstate New York.
Books
Claudio Bravo
This richly illustrated monograph, the first on Claudio Bravo, features introductory essays by two great writers, the artist's close friends Paul Bowles and Mario Vargas Llosa. They give us a personal view of the man as well as the painter and provide a glimpse into Bravo's extraordinary house in Tangier - with its eclectic collection of art objects and furnishings and seemingly endless gardens designed in a diversity of styles. Concluding the book, an interview with the artist provides important insights into his philosophy and working methods. The book also includes a catalogue raisonne, lists of exhibitions and collections, and bibliography, making it an invaluable resource for scholars as well as a highly readable profile of a remarkable man.
Conversations with Paul Bowles
For the past forty years Paul Bowles has answered questions about the autobiographical references in his novels (The Sheltering Sky, Let It Come Down, The Spider's House, and Up Above the World) and about his work as a composer in New York, all the time insisting, "I don't want anyone to know about me.". Yet in this collection of interviews dating from 1952 to the present, Bowles gives a variety of answers that reveal as much as they conceal. Too gracious to refuse interviews, he regards inquiries with the same clear-eyed detachment that marks his prose, wondering, "Why is it that Americans expect an artist's work to be a reflection of his life? They never seem to want to believe that the two can be independent of each other and go their separate ways.". Despite his reticence, Bowles frankly discusses his "unconscious" writing practice, his views on the "illiterate imagination," existentialism, his various experiments with altered states of consciousness, and nearly fifty years of expatriate life in Morocco. Included here are three interviews never before published, several that originally appeared in now obscure journals, plus interviews conducted by Jay McInerny for Vanity Fair, Jeffrey Bailey for the Paris Review, and Michael Rogers for the Rolling Stone.
Up Above the World
La vie est une jungle où les êtres se croisent, se guettent comme autant de chasseurs à l'affût de leurs proies.Mais le docteur Slade et sa femme n'étaient guère préparés à livrer de nouveaux combats lorsqu'ils accostèrent dans un port sordide d'Amérique centrale pour y recommencer leur lune de miel.Dans une ville des hauts-plateaux, le couple rencontre Vero, un charmeur et sa belle compagne Luchita. Dès lors, les événements se précipitent. Le décor est luxueux et l'atmosphère très hospitalière. Mais comme le dit Vero, "Ce n'est pas ce que vous croyez".
Travels
In a near future United States where the subliminal power of television has been boosted to irresistible levels, Dodd Corely is a man increasingly at odds with the world. His live-in girlfriend, Sheila, is addicted to the popular Travels television station, which features 24-hour-a-day viewing of a hypnotically seductive sphere bouncing on an endless, surreal journey through a variety of unspoiled natural environments. His friend and fellow veteran of the South American War, Danny Marauder, has joined the Anarchists, a disreputable group dedicated to the overthrow of the established order. His best friend, Toby, is so busy watching the Travels station's #1 rival, Jesus TV--which has just announced the greatest live special in television history: the Second Coming of Jesus Christ--that he fails to notice his own daughter is pregnant . . . a crime punishable by sterilization in this overpopulated society.
The Spider's House
Set in Fez, Morocco, during that country's 1954 nationalist uprising, The Spider's House is perhaps Paul Bowles's most beautifully subtle novel, richly descriptive of its setting and uncompromising in its characterizations. Exploring once again the dilemma of the outsider in an alien society, and the gap in understanding between cultures -- recurrent themes of Paul Bowles's writings -- The Spider's House is dramatic, brutally honest, and shockingly relevant to today's political situation in the Middle East and elsewhere.
The delicate prey, and other stories
Exemplary stories that reveal the bizarre, the disturbing, the perilous, and the wise in other civilzations.
The Sheltering Sky
'The Sheltering Sky is a book about people on the edge of an alien space; somewhere where, curiously, they are never alone' Michael Hoffman. Port and Kit Moresbury, a sophisticated American couple, are finding it more than a little difficult to live with each other. Endeavouring to escape this predicament, they set off for North Africa intending to travel through Algeria - uncertain of exactly where they are heading, but determined to leave the modern world behind. The results of this casually taken decision are both tragic and compelling.