(Current fiction and quality fiction of the past.)
"During the middle of the day it was no longer the sun alone that persecuted from above — the entire sky was like a metal dome grown white with heat.
“The merciless light pushed down from all directions; the sun was the whole sky. They took to traveling only at night, setting out shortly after twilight and halting at the first sign of the rising sun.
“The sand had been left far behind, and so had the great dead stony plains. Now there was a gray, insect like vegetation everywhere, a tortured scrub of hard shells and stiff hairy spines that covered the earth like an excrescence of hatred." – Copyright © Paul Bowles, from "The Sheltering Sky" (1949).
Examiner ran into Bowles in Tangier in 1962 with an artist protégé who gave a phony name of Yaqub al-Mansur – once the sultan of Morocco, about 700 years earlier. The young artist’s name was actually Ahmed Yacoubi, an “intimate” friend. Bowles is on record as being bi-sexual. That sort of name stunt one came to expect from Bowles’ creative circle.
Their conversation as we sat in the Café Ba Ba dealt neither with art nor writing but with speculation on who would show up at Barbara Hutton’s next bash at her castle Sidi Hosni across the street.
When Bowles died at 88 in 1999, The New York Times described him thusly: “Throughout his life, he remained an artist whose name evoked an atmosphere of dark, lonely Moroccan streets and endless scorching deserts, a haze of hashish and drug-induced visions.”
Paul Bowles was born in 1910, and studied music with composer Aaron Copland before moving to Tangier, Morocco, with his wife, Jane. His first novel, “The Sheltering Sky” (Ecco – Harper Collins) was a bestseller in the 1950s, and was made into a film by Bernardo Bertolucci in 1990, published records show. The Eco edition was published in 2005.
Bowles's prolific career included many musical compositions, novels, collections of short stories, translations, and books of travel and poetry, according to the publisher.
“The Sheltering Sky” was followed by “The Delicate Prey,” “Let It Come Down,” “The Spider's House” and “Without Stopping,” a memoir that describes his legendary associations with members of the Beat Generation.
Examiner recommends “The Sheltering Sky” for the same reasons Time magazine’s editors included it in their list of the best 100 novels – it’s a unique story well told. Readers can catch a glimpse of Bowles’ fascinating life at his official website (Paul Bowles.org).
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