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“... It was rather fun, being lost like this.The roofs our floor, the palms our ventilators.The stag’s antlers serving as a cloudrack.North was south, being lost like this.It was rather fun to thread the citywith only the sodium glow to steer by.Fun to think we would never be found.The alleys smelled of resin and leather.The small square with its switched-off fountainwas carding the winds from east and west ...”

“... Long before the sin of Orientalism was discovered, Paul Bowles had frequently been guilty of it, in word, in thought and in deed. In his first stories, for example, the natives are shining examples of naked otherness, created partly to refresh our view concerning the mixture of simplicity, guile and sexual beauty available in remote places ...”

“... In 1967​ Jane Bowles was convalescing in a Málaga psychiatric hospital when a friend brought her the reviews of her Collected Works. The book, which carried an introduction by Truman Capote, had finally brought Bowles’s writing to a wider audience than what she called ‘my five hundred goony friends ...”

“... The final section of Paul Bowles’s most famous novel, The Sheltering Sky, is prefaced by a quotation from Kafka that encapsulates the narrative trajectory of just about everything Bowles has ever written: ‘From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back ...”

“... He’s my enemy,’ Jane Auer recalled telling a friend when she first met Paul Bowles. But she immediately followed him to Mexico even so and, though she had been and would always be much more drawn to women, married him less than a year later. The instinct to court an ‘enemy’ rather than an admirer may have been a shrewd one: it seems to have been especially difficult for Bowles’s admirers to do her justice ...”

“... own pupil, with unfortunate results. Pupillage at any stage of her career is inconceivable of Jane Bowles. Two Serious Ladies, a novel begun when she was 21, is a strangely mature and confident achievement of a totally original sort. When her characters speak it is to an effect at once inconsequent and inevitable, piercing and tangential, wholly authentic to ...”

“... Africa. In the course of her travels over the next few years she will meet William Burroughs and Paul Bowles, and a number of other people who she hints are famous but who must be protected by pseudonyms. She also encounters any number of eager organs. The first belongs to a man who had just come third in the Tour de France, a fact which inexplicably ...”

“... paradoxical restriction sets in, so that the tone becomes remarkably similar to passages in Paul Bowles. Ann Schlee is very much her own writer, however, and her talent is considerable. The Part of Fortune is set in the American South, and is centred upon the Green Mansions Home for the Elderly. This lies deep in the heart of Dirty Realism County ...”

“... but in the economic or cultural heartland of the global American imperium. Except for Jane and Paul Bowles in Morocco, only Robert Stone and Joan Didion suggest themselves, and neither of them is associated closely with any one setting. On the whole, American writers seem convinced that the vital features of their society are most clearly discernible ...”

“... on some rails laid through an apple orchard.Everything recurs. Nothing gets lost in the desert, Paul Bowles writes. ‘Wichtiges kommt wieder,’ is the way German puts it: important things return. But perhaps one doesn’t know that. Hence Hrabal’s gushing sentences, his spiral or circular forms, his pages written for ‘the luxury of diagonal ...”

“... pleased to be reassured about one’s moral decline. Gavin L. is en route for Tangier to see Paul Bowles. I say that Bowles must be quite old now. ‘Yes,’ says Gavin, ‘82.’ ‘That’s not so old,’ says Lindsay. ‘Well it’s a funny age, 82,’ says Gavin. ‘I’ve known several people of 82 who ...”

“... better. Throughout the period in Tangier, the living drift among the dead. We see a fair amount of Paul Bowles ‘that shameless faker’ – a view later revised – and his ‘dungaree-wearing Lizzie wife’, Jane, whose own arrangement was the mirror-image of Burroughs’s with Joan. There is also Auden’s secretary Alan Ansen, who gets no credit here ...”

“... one moves in a cocoon of incandescent heat. You could just about imagine a story in the manner of Paul Bowles unfolding here – where an intrepid European manuscript scholar, say, is snatched by Touaregs and spends the rest of a miserable life, sun-blistered and crazed, on the fringes of the desert, never to be seen by Westerners again. But it takes a ...”

“... adventure (they had known each other three months, we had known each other nine).’ Jane and Paul Bowles are always on the move – so are she and John. Zelda and Virginia Woolf had debilitating periods and headaches – she does, too. How far can she go? In one scene, she looks at Simone Weil. ‘I am Simone Weil,’ she declares, ‘although ...”

“... terse lyricism, and worldly wisdom about the workings of power, bring to mind the short stories of Paul Bowles and Deborah Eisenberg. Remarkably for a writer of her generation (she was born in 1962), Egan seemed like an expatriate, looking back with biting irony at her fellow Americans and their insufficiently examined expectations of ...”