Novelist and composer, gay and countercultural icon, expatriate par excellence, Paul Bowles is a towering but elusive presence in 20th-century American cultural life. Based on extensive interviews with the author (she had originally met him while researching a biography of Tennessee Williams), Spencer Carr’s biography is the definitive record of a flamboyant and utterly committed life.

Colm Tóibín writes:

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. The white heroes, on the other hand, are neurotic and complex. Bowles's trick as a narrator is to make each side as unreliable as the other. While one side merely look like animals, the others, travelling with money and attitude, act like animals whenever they can, or else feel sorry for themselves when opportunities to do so do not come in sufficient quantity.

LRB 4 January 2007

Peter Owen | hardback 431 |ISBN: 9780720612547