How many midnights paul bowles

Fra Andrea. He was from Spoleto. He was actually killed? Impaled with a lance. BOWLES: Well, it begins with a quotation from Hanno, then there is an invention of mine right after that … A lot of it is quoted, quite a few quotations in there, cemented together, sometimes in verse.

I wrote it in verse. He sent it to me. A nice piece. I like his stories. It was exactly as I described it. He was an actual person. Is it factual also? Then he [the publisher] said he wanted more stories, so I sent him three short ones and a longer one. He said this was between friends. Appparently he felt that money should not be mentioned between friends. If I have a desire to write something, I write it.

I may have one again. Do you think that has affected your own writing? Doing those translations showed me really how little description is necessary. I suppose that would be analogous to their hostility to mimetic pictorial art.

Any statue or painting is false. And yet there is narrative literature in the Arab world. A few may have read them in French, or Spanish, translations. But their books exist mainly in English. Quite a while back John Barth and Saul Bellow had an argument about the importance of technical innovation—formal innovation—in literature.

Experimentation should not become a hindrance. PATTERSON: It seems to me that in contemporary fiction, some of the technically experimental writers tend to discover occasionally a new form that works well, then continue to experiment with that until it becomes sterile or repetitive. Did you ever read H.

Rider Haggard? Not even She. Any influence there? I never read Conrad until I was in my sixties. Hemingway of course I read. The stories I love.

Bowles thinks this story a failure because "I never think of it. Written "in a little cottage up on the mountain in Tangier in the autumn of '47" while the author was at work on The Sheltering Sky , that story may have been, as Bowles once said to me, "sort of a vacation [End Page ] from the desert. You don't see him because he doesn't exist—even for her [June]; in a sense he's a part of her. We feel that she's invented him. She's in the act of eating him, as it were.

And he's not interested in being eaten. That's his way of behavior, as exemplified by what he does in the bookshop. He lets the man steal the books and then catches him, rather than going in while he's stealing them.

He watches from outside. So he's been watching her from outside. Inevitably a few interpretations here and there in Patteson's book may perplex Bowles's readers.

It is correct to parallel "the collapse of first Port's, then Kit's, sanity"? Undoubtedly Kit does go insane. But are not Port's final perceptions mystical rather than mad? Bowles' short stories. They are less story and characterization than scenes and places described with great originality, bearing, let us say, the same relation to dramatic fiction that Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" bears to the same composer's "Boris Godunov.

And, leaving out the "almost," these are certainly the words to describe the title story, "The Delicate Prey," the very least of the horrors of which is a gruesome emasculation performed upon a helpless victim, upon whom is then inflicted a further "indignity" the word is the author's by the barbarian attacker.

Other pieces include: "Under the Sky," in which a marijuana addict in Central America covets and conquers an unreluctant, not young, woman tourist from the States; "The Echo," a superbly written story, with matchless dialogue, in which a Smith undergraduate, on vacation at her mother's house in Colombia, is thrown out because she comes between her mother and her mother's Lesbian lover; "The Fourth Day Out From Santa Cruz," in which a young sailor is finally accepted by his hostile shipmates only after deliberately perpetrating a cruelty that surpasses their own; "How Many Midnights," a highly literate but, to me, completely incomprehensible story about a suicide; "By the Water," and indescribably unpleasant story about a deformed monster in an Arabian public bath.

The final story, "A Distant Episode," is one of such unspeakable horror and brutality that there is no sense in trying to describe it; one's emotion, as one reads the tale, is far less that of repulsion than active anger at having to put up with it at all. There is hardly a story among the seventeen without a Latin-American, Mexican, Spanish, Algerian, Arabian or other foreign name or setting; but this connotation of romantic and far places by no means proves to be "escape" literature.