A DISTANT EPISODE: The Selected Stories

by Paul Bowles ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1988

Bowles, who has lived in Tangier, Morocco, for decades, is not only a writer's writer, to whom homage and tribute is regularly paid; by now he's almost a cult figure. Aside from The Sheltering Sky, however, a best-seller in the 1950's, he hasn't received a great deal of general attention. But he has written a lot of fascinating fiction in the past 30 years, and here he selects the best of his stories, many out of print or available only in limited editions. Most of the 24 pieces have been culled from previous collections: the title story, for example, from The Delicate Prey (1950), is a terrifying vision of a Professor who is kidnapped, trained as a kind of holy fool by nomads so that he can be sold, and finally destroyed by visionary pain. Several of these early stories involve the conflict between a Westerner and mysterious images, animals, or people from another culture. Often there is also an end-of-the-world gloss, either implicit or explicit (""I personally am content to see everything in the process of decay""). In later stories, the juxtaposition between Western sensibility and Eastern mystery is still dominant, but the tone is less alarming, the violence usually more distant: ""In the Red Room,"" for instance, from Midnight Mass (1981), a Western narrator's parents visit him in Sri Lanka, where they're taken on a tour of a shrinelike bedroom by a young stranger. In the room, the narrator discovers, the young man chopped his young bride and her illicit lover to pieces. The narrator keeps this information to himself, and his mother, puzzling over the episode, shrugs: ""Well, what you don't know won't hurt you,"" she concludes. Of the book's new stories, ""An Inopportune Visit"" is about the whimsical return to earth of Santa Rosenda after ""several hundred years of traveling in space,"" and ""In Absentia"" is a quirky epistolary account of one man's doomed attempt to control a young woman's life. Bowles' recent fiction doesn't always have the punch of the early work, but this is a definitive collection by one of the more durable voices of the 20th century.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1988

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Ecco--dist. by Norton

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1988

Categories: FICTION