Paul Bowles' "Up Above the World" (Spoiler alert)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/13/movies/13driver.html

The tale had all the hallmarks of a baroque Paul Bowles short story, set among the remaindered possessions of Bowles himself: a film director gets a call from a stranger, who says he has stumbled across an original print of the filmmaker’s long-lost first film in a windowless Tangier apartment, coated in dust and insect powder. The director, Sara Driver, at first thought the call might be a joke, but for reasons almost as strange as fiction, she kept listening.

what a cool story!

It is!

Did we ever get this sorted though? I’ve only read The Sheltering Sky, got distracted in the middle of the Jane Bowles novel and need to finish it, has one of the best author photos in existence - https://i.pinimg.com/originals/db/90/0c/db900cf915911a293fe5138e0cfa83ce.jpg

The local library keeps a sale cart out, found something I suspect is rare on there today: Jane Bowles' Feminine Wiles, perfect shape, Black Sparrow Press, 1976. Such a weird thing to turn up.

did you buy it?

curious if anyone has a recommendation of which of PB's four novels to start with

The short stories, actually. Start there. A master.

The novels are all good but The Sheltering Sky is a good place to begin. But yes the short stories are where he excelled.

Up Above the World is a good one to start with! It's a real thriller degree zero, a bit like some of Ballard's late novels.

Bowles' 'A Distant Episode' seems to be included in every 20th Century American short story anthology I own, but deserves its reputation.

"How Many Midnights," "The Echo," the creepy-chilling "Pages at Cold Point," and "The Time of Friendship," stories with breathtaking control and precision.

thanks y'all

Weird, I’ve read everything by Paul and Jane except this particular novel

in a bookstore the other night, i chanced across a collection that featured a photograph of PB in the Café Hafa in Tangier, which coincidentally is the setting for the opening scene in the novel PARTIR by Tahar Ben Jelloun, which i'm reading at the moment. naturally this led me down a rabbit hole, whereby i discovered that it was in fact via Bowles that Jelloun made some of his earliest contacts in the NYC literary scene (namely Allen Ginsberg). Bowles had a complex relationship with Tangier, where he lived from the '40s until his death in '99, and a complex relationship with Moroccan literature and its people, as both a translator/ambassador but also an orientalist and undoubtedly a racist -- complicated somewhat by the defense of PB by certain Tanjawi literary figures against the French-speaking elite (e.g. Jelloun), and because Bowles was a rare voice in defense of Berber identity and culture, which muddles somewhat the facile narrative of colonial Morocco and the emerging postwar Arab nationalism as a force of liberation. this NYRB article by Hisham Aidi gets into it:

https://www.nybooks.com/online/2019/12/20/so-why-did-i-defend-paul-bowles/

i did, incidentally, pick up a collection of his short stories (THE DELICATE PREY), and will report back if i ever find time to read it

I just read the title story from that a few days ago, a nice little trifle to read before bed.

I don't know if it's still in print but Black Sparrow Press put out a great collection of his stories. That's the one I have.

The Library of America’s publications of his works are essential. Ditto for Jane Bowles’

Guy was an amazing composer, too

I had a momentary fantasy of a piece called "So Why Did I Defend H.P. Lovecraft?" Cthulhu gives a monologue reminiscing about his interactions with the author, noting that "H.P. did so much to bring attention to the culture of the Old Ones", but ultimately "he used/abused our culture as a backdrop for his own human dramas and he cannot be forgiven for it"