Travels: Collected Writings, 1950-1993 – The Acclaimed Essays of Paul Bowles on Expatriate Life in Morocco, Tangier, and Paris

by Paul Bowles

Inmore than forty essays and articles that range from Paris to Ceylon, Thailand to Kenya, and, of course, Morocco, the great twen-tieth-century American writer encapsulates his long and full life, and sheds light on his brilliant fiction. Whether he’s recalling the cold-water artists’ flats of Paris’s Left Bank or the sun-worshipping eccentrics of Tangier, Paul Bowles imbues every piece with a deep intelligence and the acute perspective of his rich experience of the world. Woven throughout are photographs from the renowned author’s private archive, which place him, his wife, the writer Jane Bowles, and their many friends and compatriots in the landscapes his essays bring so vividly to life.

With an introduction by Paul Theroux and a chronology by Daniel Halpern

Genres: Travel, Essays, Nonfiction, Africa, History, Biography, Literature

512 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Paul Frederic Bowles grew up in New York, and attended college at the University of Virginia before traveling to Paris, where became a part of Gertrude Stein's literary and artistic circle. Following her advice, he took his first trip to Tangiers in 1931 with his friend, composer Aaron Copeland.

In 1938 he married author and playwright Jane Auer (see: Jane Bowles). He moved to Tangiers permanently in 1947, with Auer following him there in 1948. There they became fixtures of the American and European expatriate scene, their visitors including Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal. Bowles continued to live in Tangiers after the death of his wife in 1973.

Bowles died of heart failure in Tangier on November 18, 1999. His ashes were interred near the graves of his parents and grandparents in Lakemont, New York.

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 5 out of 5]

What is a travel book? For me it is the story of what happened to one person in a particular place, and nothing more than that; it does not contain hotel and highway information, lists of useful phrases, statistics, or hints as to what kind of clothing is needed by the intending visitor. It may be that such books form a category which is doomed to extinction. I hope not, because there is nothing I enjoy more than reading an accurate account by an intelligent writer of what happened to him away from home. THE SUBJECT-MATTER of the best travel books is the conflict between writer and place. It is not important which of them carries the day, so long as the struggle is faithfully recorded.

[robin friedman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Journeys With Paul Bowles

After reading Paul Bowles' famous novel, "The Sheltering Sky", I read "Let it Come Down" and "The Spider's House", the two novels included with "The Sheltering Sky" in the Library of America compilation of Bowles' novels. I was interested in Bowles and thus turned to this volume, "Travels: Collected Writings" (2010) which offers a broader view of the author from that offered by the novels. Bowles (1910 -- 1999), an American born in Queens, was an outsider and a wanderer through his long life. As a young man, he spent time in Europe and north Africa, among other places. In the middle of a career as a composer in New York City, Bowles moved to Tangier in 1947 and spent the rest of his life as an expatriate. He also changed his career activities to concentrate on writing more than on musical composition.

The 39 travel essays in this volume show a different touch from Bowles' novels. Written over a 40 year period, most of the essays were commissioned by magazines of the time, including "Holiday" "The Nation", "The American Mercury"," "Gentleman's Quarterly" and more. Bowles wrote some of the essays as introductions to books by other writers, while two of the essays are published in this collection for the first time. The writing is accessible and entertaining. Several of the essays are much more extended that would be possible in most magazine writing of today.

The essays show a great deal of immediacy and a sharp power of description. The tone of the pieces is often informal and colloquial with Bowles inviting his readers along as guests. The essays include substantial historical background for places many readers will find exotic and strange. Several essays deal with the same place at different times and slightly different locales, offering varying perspectives. The essays are largely arranged in the order in which they were written. The first two essays, however, describe Bowles' early adventures as a young man in his late teens and early 20's struggling to find his way with little money. These essays present a lively picture of bohemian artistic life in the Paris between the World Wars.

Paris is not the focus of the volume. The reader of this book will travel with Bowles to the Sahara desert, Spain, Ceylon, Turkey, Kenya, Thailand, and India. Most of all, the reader will travel with Bowles to his beloved Morocco. The Moroccan journeys go to places of romance in the reader's imagination, including Tangier, Marrakesh, Casablanca, and Fez. There are also essays on rural life in the Moroccan hills. In the late 1950s, Bowles traveled over 25,000 miles in Morocco to record and preserve the dying traditions of Moroccan folk music. Several extended essays in this book document his efforts. The book covers ancient walled cities with mysterious alleys, winding streets, native cafes and lively bazaars. Bowles teaches the reader a great deal about the interaction between the local populations and the Europeans, and he regrets the impending change to modernity. He is unapologetic about his use of kif, hashish, and other substances. In addition to towns and cities, he portrays beaches, large deserts, mountains, and oceans. He tells stories.

While most of the essays are place-specific, Bowles discusses his view of travel writing in some of the pieces, including, "The Challenge to Identity", first published in 1958 in "The Nation". Bowles writes:

"The subject-matter of the best travel books is the conflict between writer and place. It is not important which of them carries the day, so long as the struggle is faithfully recorded."

*** ****

"The writer must make the decision to adhere to a scrupulous honesty in reporting. Any conscious distortion is equivalent to cheating at solitaire: the purpose of the game is nullified. The account must be as near the truth as he can get, and it seems to me the easiest way to achieve that is to aim for precision in describing his own reactions. A reader can get an idea of what a place is really like only if he knows what its effects were upon someone of whose character he has some idea, of whose preferences he is aware. Thus it seems essential that the writer place a certain insistence upon the objective presentation of his own personality; it provides an interpretative gauge with which the reader can measure for himself the relative importance of each detail, like the scale of miles in the corner of a map."

Bowles admirably carries out his stated purpose for travel writing in the essays collected in this volume.

One of the essays I most enjoyed was "Yallah" which Bowles wrote as an introduction to a book of photographs of the Sahara Desert. The essay captures a great deal of that strange place. The final essay, "Paul Bowles: his Life" is less the story of a journey that an autobiography written in broken, poetic lines. This previously unpublished work offers an introduction to Bowles' life, thinking, and wanderings.

I am not likely to visit many of the places that Bowles describes, or more accurately, the successors to these places in the 21st Century. This book engaged me and put me in touch with the places and people it describes, which is the character of good writing in many genres. It is valuable to have Bowles' travel essays collected and preserved in a single volume. Readers with an interest in Bowles, exotic places, or simply good writing, will enjoy this collection.

Robin Friedman

[Bloodorange · Rating 4 out of 5]

That was lovely, very intelligent and perceptive, but long and a bit monotonous, at this length - at 70% I still really enjoyed it, but also I did not feel I will get something new, so opted out of finishing the audiobook.

[Patrick McCoy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can say that Paul Bowles is one of my favorite writers and now having read Travels: Collected Writings 1950-1993 (2010), I have finished reading all of his available writings. This collection is mostly made up of pieces that were, collected earlier in Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue (1963). I think if there were that many pieces in a collection by another writer I might have not bothered with the collection or skipped those pieces. But I decided to re-read them and savor the familiarity and evocative scenes described Bowles who has a gift of bringing the atmosphere of a place to life, for example the Sahara Desert in "Baptism of Solitude," as well as the people that populate those specific places, like in "Mustapha and his Friends." There are two excellent pieces about his travels into countryside and mountains of Morocco to record the traditional music there that is some of his best writing in "The Route to Tassemit" and "The Rif, to Music." In those pieces, in particular, he brings Morocco and the inhabitants to life. But he awakened an interest for me in his in his part-time home in Ceylon, that is the subject of "Fishtraps and Private Business." I plan to make a pilgrimage to his private island on my visit there next month. The book is arranged chronologically by editor Mark Ellingham and contains mostly travel pieces but also travel-oriented journals, introductions to photographic books, and even a glossary of kif terms for a 1960s books on cannabis. It includes an introduction by one of my favorite travel writers Paul Theroux as well. I suspect some of the material may have been cannibalized for Bowles' autobiography, Without Stopping, which I also recently read. The earliest pieces are from Bowles early days as a teenager in France-among the 30 uncollected writings spread throughout the book. There were a number of pieces from the now defunct Holiday magazine that were among my favorites as well: "How to Live on a Part-Time Island" (another piece that inspired me to visit Ceylon), "Madeira" (on the isolat4ed Portuguese island), "Window on the Past" (about Spain), as well as several pieces on Morocco and cities in Morocco. I was impressed with pieces about travel in Istanbul ("A Man Must Not Be Very Moslem"), India ("Notes Mailed at Nagercoil), the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya ("Letter from Kenya") as well as a piece about the civil war in neighboring Algeria ("Sad for U.S., Sad for Algeria"). I think the following quote from "Windows on the Past" sums up Bowles' perspective on travel writing:

If I am faced with the decision of choosing between visiting a circus and a cathedral, a cafe and a public monument, or a fiesta and a museum, I'm afraid I shall normally take the circus, the cafe, and the fiesta, trusting to luck that I shall manage to see the other s later. I supposed I'm not what today is called culture-minded. Perhaps the that is because the culture of a land at any given moment is the people who live in it and the lives they lead in it, not the possessions they have inherited from those who came before. They may or may not profit by their legacy. If they do, so much the better for them; but whether they do or do not, their culture is represented by them and not by their history.

I feel a sort of kinship with Bowles and hope to see as much as he has seen. I can't help but note that he did it so much earlier than others and had to struggle and suffer in order to do so. Bowles was not a fan of progress and I suspect most travel today would have been too tame for his type of adventure lust-very much a trailblazer and original thinker.

[Sorin Hadârcă · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paul Bowles has an eye for details and a way with words, that much is certain. In this sad age of travel restrictions, it provided me the best possible vehicle for unrestricted space and time travel. The journey was great.

[JulieK · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked the travel writing, but I think enjoyed even more his observations of African countries during their anti-colonial period and how the political changes were shaping them. Favorite quote:

"If I am faced with the decision of choosing between visiting a circus and a cathedral, a café and a public monument, or a fiesta and a museum, I'm afraid I shall normally take the circus, the café, and the fiesta, trusting to luck that I shall manage to see the others later."

His point is that the people currently living in a place make up its culture, not the famous monuments or relics of its past. I like this way of thinking about travel.

[Diana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Пол Боулс е от породата изчезнали пътешественици, които не просто пътуват, а опознават света встрани от баналните туристически забележителности, чрез бита на обикновените хора. Предпочита тяхната компания, храна и обичаи пред светския лукс и скучното присъствие на европейци и американци, потапя се в изчезващата култура, манталитет и история на посетените страни, привързва се по своему и прекарва в тях по-голямата част от живота си, пътувайки или обитавайки собствен дом.

"Всички папагали говорят" събира впечатленията му от Европа, Африка, Азия и Южна Америка. Това не са просто пътеписи, а обяснение в любов към природата, навиците и обичаите на местните, за които разказва много увлекателно и с чувство за хумор. Езикът му е лек и образен, можеш да видиш, усетиш, чуеш, помиришеш и вкусиш. Ценен е и погледът му отвътре към историята, религиозните порядки, културата и икономическата ситуация в посетените страни.

Освен като съдържание, книгата е удоволствие и във всяко друго отношение - находчиво заглавие (взаимствано от един от най-забавните разкази), корица, превод, техническо изпълнение, липса на грешки, осезаемо присъствие на редактор и коректор. "Прозорец" са единствените, които успешно конкурират "Жанет 45" на върха на личната ми класация за "Перфектното издателство, с чиито книги никога не можеш да сбъркаш".

[Jimileek · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book to savor. At times dreamlike & contemplative, lovely with understated humor. (Much less judgmental than Paul Theroux whose writing I love but whose opinions I find abrasive and at times offensive.) Valuable for its mid-20th century descriptions of the destinations travel writers still visit and write about today. Lovers of literary travel writing should own this.

[Zia · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I love this book, it was written at a time when people made travels not tourism. I hope it will enchant everyone as it did me and perhaps even encourage some to visit new places with a different state of mind."

[Juliana · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was writing up on the history of Holiday magazine and saw Paul Bowles mentioned a few times. I ordered this book up from the library in case there was some information about Holiday in this collection of Bowles's travel writing which included a number of articles from the magazine.

His writing is delicious. He had one of those adventurous expat lives that most people dream about and he describes places like Morroco, Tangiers, Ceylon, Thailand...

In writing on travel literature Bowles wrote, "What is a travel book? For me it is the story of what happened to one person in a particular place, and nothing more than that; it does not contain a hotel and highway information, lists of useful phrases, statistics, or hints as to what kind of clothing is needed by the intending visitor. It may be that such books form a category which is doomed to extinction. I hope not, because there is nothing I enjoy more than reading an accurate account by an intelligent writer of what happened to him away from home."

Bonus points also that one of my favorite curmudgeonly travel writers, Paul Theroux wrote the Introduction.

Here he is on meeting three Thai Buddhist monks, the leader of which remarked on Bowles's room:
"He glanced up at me and went on talking. 'Your room is beautiful. We are not accustomed to such luxury.' His voice was flat; he was trying to conceal his disapproval. The three conferred briefly in undertones. 'My friends say they have never seen such a luxurious room,' he reported, watching me closely through his steel-rimmed spectacles to see my reaction. I failed to hear."

Here is Bowles on culture:
"If I am faced with the decision of choosing between visiting a circus and a cathedral, a cafe or a public monument, or a fiesta or a museum, I'm afraid I shall normally take the circus, the cafe, and the fiesta, trusting to luck that I shall manage to see the others later. I suppose I'm simply not what today is called culture-minded. Perhaps that is because to me the culture of a land at any given moment is the people who live in it and the lives they lead in it, not the possessions they have inherited from those who came before."

[João · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fico surpreendido sempre que leio sobre Bowles e reparo, como se fosse a primeira vez, que Bowles nasceu em Nova Iorque, que era americano. Sempre me parece que Bowles é um dos derradeiros súbditos do império britânico em decadência. A subtileza e erudição do pensamento, a abertura de espírito, a curiosidade, a ironia e o humor discretos, o comportamento contido, sem sentimentalismo, um certo sentimento de classe e o sentir que o mundo é a sua casa, tudo faz dele, para mim, um típico viajante britânico, a par de outros grandes viajantes britânicos do século XX, como E.M. Forster, Jan Morris ou Robert Byron.

"Viagens" é uma coletânea das crónicas sobre os lugares e as pessoas que Bowles foi visitando e conhecendo ao longo da sua vida. Escreveu-as para revistas de viagens e jornais, bem como para introduções ou prefácios a livros de fotografias. As suas crónicas não têm um tema agregador nem uma linha de argumentação específica - não foram escritas para serem publicadas em conjunto - mas não surgem desconexas: o cimento que as agrega é personalidade de Bowles, a fluência, articulação e elegância da sua escrita. Mais do que crónicas, lêem-se como contos ou pequenos romances.

Porque estão organizadas cronologicamente, à medida que a leitura das crónicas progride vamos sendo inundados pelo sentimento de que certos paraísos se perderam definitivamente. Os encantos e mistérios de Marrocos, a Tânger dos tempos do estatuto internacional, a cultura berbere sendo diluída pela árabe, a música e os instrumentos tradicionais do Rife, o isolamento do deserto do Saara, uma ilha perdida no Ceilão, tudo parece esboroar-se inexoravelmente de crónica para crónica. Mas esta melancolia que se desprende das linhas de Bowles não é deprimente, sentimentalista ou conservadora. Parece-se mais com aquele sentimento morno e bom com que nos recordamos dos melhores anos da nossa juventude. E é esse sentimento morno e bom que resta depois de terminada a leitura destas "Viagens".

[Don · Rating 5 out of 5]

(FROM MY BLOG) We often  travel  to seek the strange and the mysterious, which sometimes means simply  seeing how other people in other cultures live their lives.  American writer (and musician)  Paul Bowles spent his life traveling and observing other peoples.  His fiction evokes the strange, the mysterious, and even the frightening and bizarre.

His best known novel, The Sheltering Sky, follows an American couple into the Sahara, where they find more than they sought, in writing that casts an almost hypnotic spell on the reader.  Bowles's best known short story, perhaps, The Delicate Prey, also set deep  in the Sahara, is a horrifying tale of crime and punishment among residents of the desert, desert dwellers whose ideas of justice are untempered by mercy.

I was introduced to Bowles through his fiction, his stories of the Sahara and its effects on those who lived in, or visited the life of, the desert.  I had also heard stories of Bowles's private life -- stories of a man who spent most of his life as an expatriate in Tangier, who lived for years in an interesting marriage to a lesbian writer,  and who was a friend and confidante of many American writers including members of the Beat generation.

I was unprepared for the writing to which he evidently devoted much of his time -- travel writing for mainstream publications.  His book, Travels, contains some 39 essays, most of them published in the late, lamented Holiday magazine during the 1950s and 60s  -- a magazine that was to travel writing what the New Yorker is to general literature.   His writing presents scenes and vignettes almost as strange as those in his fiction, but in a first-person narrative form  that is far more accessible to the uninitiated first-time Bowles reader.

Tangier was his preferred residence, and Morocco his preferred country, and some of the best essays describe experiences in Moroccan cities, in the mountain areas (the Rif, the Atlas), and in the bleak (but always surprising) expanses of the Sahara.  Bowles first moved to Tangier in the early 1930s as a youth.  Tangier -- for many years an "international city" under French and Spanish administration --  has no major "tourist sites," he acknowledges, but, in a 1958 article, he found much to love.

In Europe, it seems to me, the past is largely fictitious; to be aware of it one must have previous knowledge of it.  In Tangier, the past is a physical reality as perceptible as sunlight.

 He saw both the city and the country evolve from a primitive residence of Berbers and Arabs, governed by French and Spanish colonial powers, to a far more modern and independent nation. 

Bowles (who died in 1999) was no sympathizer with colonial rule.  He was even less, perhaps, a sympathizer with the "modernizing" (read "Europeanizing and Americanizing") ferver of Moroccan nationalist leaders.  Where Morocco's rulers saw progress, Bowles saw foundering attempts at globalization -- the gradual replacement of local crafts and foods with mass produced imported goods and services.

The last essays in this book were written in the early 1990s.  I'm not sure to what extent Bowles's fears for the future have come true, although "McDonaldization" continues unabated in many parts of the world.  In an article written in 1984, he wrote about the medieval medina in Fez:

Yet with the increasing poverty in the region, the city clearly cannot continue much longer in its present form.   ...  A house which formerly sheltered one family now contains ten or twelve families, living, it goes without saying, in unimaginable squalor.  The ancient dwellings are falling rapidly into disrepair.  And so at last, it is the people from outside the walls who have taken over the city, and their conquest, a natural and inevitable process, spells its doom.  That Fez should still be there today, unchanged in its outward form, is the surprising phenomenon.

I visited Fez, for my first and, so far, only visit, in 2012.  I have nothing earlier in my own experience  with which to compare it.  All I can say is that the city, when I visited it, was magical -- magical and apparently non-ersatz, thriving, and packed with local manufacturing (e.g., leather tanning) and shops, and local residents.  (It also had its share of tourists, of course.)   I would love to find a place to stay overnight within the medina on a future visit.

So the death and decay of Morocco is all relative, I suppose.  The past was always better.  I'm not being entirely ironical, because by Bowles's standards the past no doubt was better, more true to local culture -- even though the Moroccan residents probably had less money, less food, and worse housing.

Bowles's travel articles aren't limited in topic to Morocco.  He writes about locales as disparate as Paris, Seville, Istanbul, Algeria, Central America, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Kenya, Madeira, and Thailand.  He writes a series of articles about a project he undertook under a grant, recording tribal music throughout the mountainous areas of Morocco -- at a time when the Moroccan government was hoping to stamp out "folk music" as an indication of non-modern backwardness.  Always, Bowles has an eye for the strange, an ear for the good story, an empathy for the people with whom he speaks, a sensitivity to their music and to their lives.

Reading the essays and articles in  Travels is as close as most of us will get to obtaining a feel for many various cultures in the world, and especially for those cultures as they existed before and a decade or two after World War II.  And learning about the world's hidden places and cultures from a gifted writer with a clear sense of perception renders them no less intriguing or mysterious.  Intriguing and mysterious to us, as they were even to Bowles himself.

[Steve Walsh · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful collection of travels by a seasoned wanderer in the time of glamour and occasionally less glamorous travel.

[Casee Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Travels, Paul Bowles's writings – all penned between 1950 and 1993 – actively document his revelations and unique understandings of art, culture and the world through Ceylon, Spain, India, France and beyond, to North Africa, where his writings about Tangier give gleaming evidence to his passion for the place where he spent the rest of his life. He writes at length on the characters that seasoned his experiences, as well as the nature that arrested his consciousness; from the sky of the Sahara, "compared to which all other skies seem faint-hearted efforts" (Baptism of Solitude, 1953) to a peasant in Madeira about whom Bowles wrote, "There was a definite difference between this face and the kind of faces I was used to seeing. It was as if this one had been made by hand, the others mass-produced." (Madeira, 1960)

...read the full review at my blog.

[Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating and beautifully written insight into the life and culture of various countries in the world visited and lived in by Paul Bowles. I loved how he paints windows on the people and society he observes around him rather than trying to give one a guide on how to get there and where to stay. Is descriptions are at times sublime and poetic. The various essays and writings give tantalising glimpses of historical events and cultural norms in an era that I have little knowledge of and which tempt me to investigate further.

[Max Carmichael · Rating 3 out of 5]

I doubt Bowles would have approved of this posthumous compilation - there are several articles I wouldn't have included, and it doesn't all hang together thematically - but with its chronological development toward the poignant, unpublished autobiographical "journal" and the biographical material at the end, I now feel much closer to one of my very favorite writers, whose private life has always been something of a mystery.

[Miguel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Uma colecção de textos sobre viagens, escritos ao longo de sessenta anos, com natural ênfase para Marrocos e o Saara. Este tipo de colectâneas é sempre um pouco desequilibrado, dada a dispersão da origem dos textos, mas o nível geral é excelente. Para além da capacidade de observação e da sagacidade do autor, marcou-me o humor, e uma certa distância em relação a si próprio. Fiquei com vontade de ler a ficção de PB, de que, embaraçosamente, não conheço nada.

[John Reino · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love travel books but this one is more history. Very well written, great adventure, I read 2 books at a time do I'm looking for a new trsve

log. It's fun to read about distant places even in this day and age of comps and what not. Thanks

[Byron Rempel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of travel writings from the second part of the last century, with Bowles declaring his love of the living past that is Morocco, are now themselves time-traveling portals. Among the desert pieces are scattered a few portraits of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) where he lived for a time, a bit of India, Kenya, and various other countries. As he admits, he is sent “into a state of euphoria” by two types of landscapes – desert or tropical forest. “One with the minimum and the other with the greatest possible amount of vegetation.”

I read this while traveling through the minimal landscape of Morocco, and what a joy it was to have Bowles as a private travel guide there – I’d highly recommend taking this along as an antidote to any list of hotels and restaurants and tourist traps. It’s not only his perception of things, or the fact that he knows the place well having lived there for decades (it was Gertrude Stein who instinctively knew he’d be at home in Tangiers, and told him to get out of 1930s France). It’s how he does it.

Some things a traveler like myself might feel but be unable to put into words right away, Bowles has the skill and poetic heart to unveil. “The very narrowness of ideas has kept the place pure, kept it medieval,” he says of Fez. “For the Westerner does not so much feel in a distant place here: the removal is rather in time. A thousand years ago the cities of Europe must have been very much like this.” Of course, he is largely writing in the 1950s and 60s, but things still change slowly in Morocco. The quiet medinas and souks he describes – locked in time because their narrow pathways don’t allow cars – now have scooters and their brazen riders, but they’re still hardly more frequent than donkeys.

Here's his take on the religions of his favourite countries: “There are Hindus and Moslems in every corner of Ceylon, but neither of these orthodoxies seems fitting for the place. Hinduism is too fanciful and chaotic, Islam too puritanical and austere. Buddhism, with its gentle agnosticism and luxuriant sadness, is so right in Ceylon that you feel it could have been born here, could have grown up out of the soil like the forests.” Gentle agnosticism and luxuriant sadness! Never heard Buddhism described that way, but he almost converted me.

Bowles is also a master of the unsaid, something that is rare these days – perhaps especially in the West, we feel that we should say everything explicitly because we can. We’re free, goddam it! But then we miss the delight of the unsaid, like this:
Among the Touareg, “A married woman whose husband was away was free to go at night to the graveyard dressed in her finest apparel, lie on the tombstone of one of her ancestors, and invoke a certain spirit called Idebni, who always appeared in the guise of one of the young men of the community. If she could win Idebni’s favor, he gave her news of her husband; if not, he strangled her. The Touareg women, being very clever, always managed to bring back news of their husbands from the cemetery.”

And finally, Bowles’ agility in creating lasting and unforgettable images, as well as delighting in the bizarre and humourous, will always keep him in the pantheon of great travel writers:
“Another time I entered Tunisia on camelback from across the Great Eastern Erg. I had two camels and one hard-working camel driver, whose job it was to run all day long from one beast to the other and try, by whacking their hind legs, to keep them walking in something resembling a straight line. This was a much more difficult task than it sounds; although our course was generally due east, one of the animals had an inexplicable desire to walk southward, while the other was possessed by an equally mysterious urge to go north. The poor man passed his time screaming: “Hut! Aïda!” and trying to run both ways at once. His turban was continually coming unwound, and he had no time to attend to the scarf he was knitting, in spite of the fact that he kept the yarn and needles dangling around his neck, ready to work on at any moment.”

The only thing that stops me giving this five stars is that the Kindle version was apparently transcribed by a robot – there’s an annoying amount of typos and misspellings that surely would have driven Bowles or any self-respecting editor mad. Makes you long for the good old Medieval days.

[AB Freeman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Since enjoying his breakout novel, The Sheltering Sky, I’ve begun to read through the collected works of Paul Bowles. It’s an endeavour I’d recommend to all. This collection, a delightful mishmash of varying travel experiences, situates Bowles as the cosmopolitan thinker affected by the circumstances of his surroundings that resonates throughout his novels. As such, several essays provide important thoughts for the traveller to consider.

“The Challenge to Identity” directly considers the role of travel writing. In it, he considers the varying identities the traveller encounters, both internally and through interaction with locals and the overall environment. His position, that “the subject-matter of the best travel books is the conflict between writer and place...many of the travel books that remain in the memory have been produced by writers expert at the fashioning of novels” echoes through my experience of reading V.S. Naipaul, Paul Theroux, Elias Canetti, and Amitav Ghosh. In addition to this sentiment, Bowles details the challenges writers face in encountering a place, asserting that “…whatever attempts to make a place accessible to the tourist are just so many barricades in the way of the writer, and if he manages to make contact with the place it will be in spite of them rather than thanks to them.” As I’ve become more aware of the world as a traveller – rather than a tourist – I’ve discovered that no truer words concerning the capitalistic effects upon modern tourism have yet been spoken.

Another compelling essay that presents distinct differences between how travellers and natives experience a place arrives in “The Ball at Sidi Hosni,” in which he presents both guests and watchers-on – native individuals perched along the walls in observation of the ball’s proceedings – that powerfully reflects the prevailing colonial divide existing in early 1960s Morocco. Indeed, this vast gulf echoes the environment in colonial Algeria that likely contributed to the causes of the Algerian War. While early 1960s Tangier did not suffer from the exact complications, Bowles’ portrayal presents a clear gap between the city’s wealthy foreign elites and native “hoi polloi.”

“Kif: Prologue and Compendium” remains an important essay, where he laments the destructive impact of the Judeo-Christian civilisational ethos upon Indigenous culture. Here, he describes how this manifested in the outlawing of traditional marijuana products across Northern Africa, thereby opening the door to Bowles’ own relationship with its remedies. As he so eloquently portrays, at the time, the region was shifting from the old world to the new, with the banning of traditional modes of recreation positioned clearly at the centre of that shift. This essay eloquently expresses what is lost in the transition.

4 stars. Of specific note is the Chronology of Bowles’ life at the end of the text. Reading it, I was surprised to discover what a rich and varied life he lived. Viewing that allowed an understanding that the sentiments contained throughout his essays arose from a clear connection and analysis of self-in-place, a model that serves well as I pursue my own attempts at travel essays.

[Adam Bregman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now that I have read a lot of Bowles' work, all of it variably stupendous, I can say definitively that it is the short stories and essays that are his most glorious achievements. As for the short stories, I don't think there are many writers that compare, though he is most famous for his bestselling novel, The Sheltering Sky. Just a few notches down from his short stories are his essays. This collection is devoted to those that are travel or place related. Many were written for a magazine called Holiday (Hemingway and Steinbeck were also contributors), but they will not make you want to book a flight anywhere. Bowles lived in Morocco for most of his life and also purchased a tiny island off Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) in the early 1950s. Otherwise, he got around, purchasing a parrot in Costa Rica, sightseeing with monks in Thailand, hanging out with Gertrude Stein in Paris in the 1930s (It was her suggestion to go to Tangier). This is more a book about Bowles' incredible life and particularly his expansive knowledge of the culture of Morocco, than it is a book of travel-related features. Paul Theroux has a short introduction and you can tell he is not entirely at ease summarizing the work of this literary giant.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had heard of the author, mostly regarding the film adaption of The Sheltering Sky, which I have not seen.

At 17 hours, this audiobook seemed a bit daunting, but not a problem as it turned out! Top notch writing quality the main factor here, but editorial credit for this anthology as well. One slowly sees the changes from colonial times, to post-Independence, and up through late 20th century. Moreover, there are encounters with local Jews; a group all but vanished after independence. To round things out, there are essays on other places as well for variety.

Excellent audio narration, where I listened roughly an hour a day. A bargain for an Audible credit, and I'll likely listen again at some point. Highly recommended!

[Ryna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got this book from my brother a while back and decided to finally read it. It’s a collection of writings by Bowles. Some pieces I enjoyed more than others.

One thing I don’t care for with his writing is that even though it’s “nonfiction” and’s he isn’t exactly writing like a documentarian, it’s his perspective of things and there are aspects where I go “Was that really true?” It’s hard to tell how much is embellished or what is downright made up.

The pieces I enjoyed the most are the ones about the folk music of Morocco and pieces about his life in Paris and Sri Lanka.

[Kamila Jast · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a fascinating journey around the world through cultures and customs!
A gem book - humorous, funny, intelligent, making you burst out laughing many times in many places. An easy read, interestingly written by very articulate and observant writer, and passionate traveller. Those who love R. Kapuscinski’s books will love Paul Bowles; same curiosity about places and people, history, similar reporter's style of writing.

[Sue Fleming · Rating 4 out of 5]

I only read the sections on Morocco.

Paul Bowles articles on his travels between 1950 and 1993 make interesting reading as they create vivid pictures of the people in Morocco and the way they lived at that time. He also writes of political events, all of which give an historical insight into the country. However, the articles lack depth and centre much on the writer himself.

[Vicky Pinpin-Feinstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wanted to know about Morocco before going there

And Bowles’s pieces on Morocco over many years gave me a Morocco in prose that I truly appreciated. Enjoyed his insight on music in particular.

[Terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started reading this collection of essays in anticipation of a trip to Morocco. The Virus prevented the trip but it has been rescheduled. I found each essay interesting, insightful and inspiring. I really appreciated his writing and the adept descriptions of places I hope to visit.

[David Sanders · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating book of Bowles' pubished articles about his world travels from the 1930's onward. I particularly enjoyed the great detail about Morocco before the tourists arrived. Read it if you are interested in true travel writing - about the people and places as viewed by an outside observer.

[Marina Domingues · Rating 4 out of 5]

Um livro que nos permite viajar sentados no nosso sofá, dando-nos uma visão nítida dos locais por onde o autor passou (sobretudo norte de África). As histórias, contadas por um dos escritores mais eruditos do século XX dão vontade de viver o que ele viveu! Sem dúvida que recomendo.

[Tim Chamberlain · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent. Understated observation at its best. Paul Bowles will always rank high up in my pantheon of favourite writers.