Volume 36, Number 18 · November 23, 1989
Pipe Dreams
By Robert Craft
An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles
by Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 501 pp., $24.95
Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue: Scenes From the Non-Christian World
by Paul Bowles
Ecco, 192 pp., $8.50 (paper)
A Distant Episode
by Paul Bowles
Ecco, 352 pp., $11.95 (paper)
'For the American academic, Paul Bowles is still odd man out; he writes as if Moby-Dick had never been written.' Melville apart, Gore Vidal's remark a decade ago remains true today. The laureate of loneliness and dislocation, of damaged psyches, of lives out of control or slipping through the net, is very different from the present-day practitioners of the literature of delinquency to which Bowles opened the doors, or floodgates, forty years ago. At the same time, an 'American academic' biography has appeared, nearly all of the books have been reprinted, and a film of the best-selling novel The Sheltering Sky has been announced. Despite the kicking and screaming author, the mantle, or djellaba, of canonization as a comfy classic of American literature is in the making.
Review, 5678 words
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