Up Above the World (Bowles)

I had often heard the name Paul Bowles uttered in the same breath as many of my favorite books. The words most commonly accompanying descriptions of his works were ones that piqued my interest: horror, viciousness, fear, and simplicity. My childhood fascination with all things frightening has given way into a love of a sense of sublimated horror in literature. Kafka, Hamsun, Celine, even Dostoevsky: all know how to insert some unknown dread into their books which seem to arise from somewhere near madness.

Paul Bowles certainly fits into this strange niche. His books seem to primarily revolve around couples who are out of their depths in some foreign land, and always give the impression that something horrible is on the verge of happening. In The Sheltering Sky a young couple implodes while traveling through Africa, leaving traces of their own insecurities and inhumanities in the form of death, fear, and failed immersion. The pair are notably lopsided, as they travel with a friend who is more often than not a source of animosity for the two.

This lopsidedness appears again in Up Above the World, this time in the form of a sizable age difference between the male Dr. Slade and his young wife, Day. Again, the couple is on holiday, this time in South America, and again Bowles teases out a discomforting feeling of alienation in every movement the two make. By chance, the Slades meet an ex-pat living in the unnamed country and are invited to his lavish apartment, where most of the rest of the novel unfolds.

The body of the text is a strange sort of chess match. Day begins to grow uncertain about their host's motives, and her fear only serves to drive a wedge further between her and her husband. There is a constant sense of impending threat surrounding Grove, their host, but it is impossible to say whether this is unfounded or not. Bowles purposefully avoids tipping his hand too early, keeping the reader unsure of both the direction the book will take, as well as the true intentions of many of the characters. It is a strange sort of fever dream that only really makes sense when looked at afterward.

However, there is truth in the events as they are happening, and they are not merely lead-ups to some reveal in the end, a la Shyamalan. Bowles exhibits a deep care for his characters, bringing them to life very naturally and imbuing a sense of cruel reality into each scene.

Where Bowles truly succeeds (again, as he did in The Sheltering Sky) is in the depictions of an unraveling reality. For example:

In front of him, not three feet away, there was a face--a muzzle, rather, for it surely belonged to an animal--looking at him with terrible intensity. It was unmoving, fashioned from a nameless, constantly dripping substance. Unmoving, yet it must have moved, for now the mouth was much farther open; long twisted tendons had appeared in each cheek. He watched, frozen and unbelieving, while the whole jaw swiftly melted and fell away, leaving the top part of the muzzle intact. The eyes glared more savagely than before; they were telling him that sooner or later he would have to pay for having witnessed that moment of its suffering. He took a step backward and looked again. There were only leaves and shadows of leaves--no muzzle, no eyes, nothing. But the leaves were pulsating with energy. At any moment they could swell and become something other than what they were.

Scenes like this one evolve from seemingly nowhere in Bowles' writing. He seems deeply in touch with a lurking madness which most people wish to coat over with a successful relationship, job, friends, and vacation. In his writing, it is always still there, beneath it all. This immediately makes him a difficult author, though a very rewarding one.

The Sheltering Sky is considered his masterpiece, and I do think that it is a more complete statement than Up Above the World, however, if you like The Sheltering Sky, know that his other works are equally as well honed. Up Above the World probably won't end up being your favorite book when you're through with it, but it is the product of an incredibly skilled writer. And in the couple-in-trouble-on-vacation genre, this is far and away superior to Ian McEwan's fairly crappy novel The Comfort of Strangers which was, probably, modeled after Up Above the World.

Happy Musical Surprises of Late

Flight - Flowers
The Yummy Fur - Sexy World
Pere Ubu - Non-alignment Pact
This Heat - S.P.Q.R.
The Scrotum Poles - Pick the Cat's Eyes Out
Eat Skull - Oregon Dreaming
1990s - See You at the Lights

Past-due

It has been far too long since this has been updated. I've been without internet here, and there's a whole slew of books (Hot Water Music, Tortilla Flat, The Sheltering Sky, Group Portrait with Lady, The Road) and fights (Williams/Martinez, Diaz/Malinaggi II, Angulo/Yorgey) to discuss. I'll try and get to these but I might just have to do some alluding, since I prefer to write about something when it's fresh in my mind. Probably the next post will be on Paul Bowles' Up Above the World, which will allow me to write about The Sheltering Sky as well. Who knows! Its a wild world, baby baby.

Box Elder

Jim Lampley and Emanuel Steward state, after tonight's win, that Manny Pacquiao is one of the greatest fighters of all time. All signs point towards their being correct. It is an exciting time to be a fan of the sport.

The Woman in the Dunes (Abe)

This is my second time with Japanese author Kobo Abe. Last year, while a temp agency had me sitting at a desk in a hotel for 8 hours a day, I read his meta-detective novel 'The Ruined Map.' Many of the ideas in the book were interesting and compelling, but there was something about the flow of the prose that just broke up the pacing of the story for me. At times, descriptions seemed as though they were full of detail but somehow lacking an object, as if the central idea were simply taken for granted as already explained. It didn't seem stylistic, though--this problem I had wasn't coming off as an attempt on Abe's part to purposefully obfuscate or to make a point. I remember being a little disappointed, even though I had been looking forward to the book since I had found out about it.

Now, with 'the Woman in the Dunes,' I've had a similar problem. Again, there is a fantastically simple and interesting story: a man leaves his home, suddenly, without telling anyone, and goes to a sea-side town to study the insect life there. He is not an entomologist by profession, but it is one of his favorite hobbies. Upon reaching the town he finds, surprisingly, a vast series of dunes and almost no town to speak of. Only when he gets further in does he notice that most of the houses are deep within huge sand pits, hundreds of feet down below the surface, in an almost inverse dune. While exploring, it grows dark, and he comes upon a villager who offers to find a place to put him up. He is brought down into one of the pits via ladder and placed in a home with the titular unnamed Woman. From then on, he is stuck, wondering why the town operates the way it does, why people don't run away, how life can be lived in this environment, and why he has been forced into it.

There are lots of strong ideas and some very good imagery. The constant threat of falling sand into the house, into the food, water, their clothes, mouths, skin, etc., gives the novel an uncomfortable feeling of dismal and squalid claustrophobia. The repetition of duties and the indecipherable actions of the Woman give the novel its purported 'existential' character, continuing in the tradition of books which find us to be isolated within ourselves amongst others in an absurd world. But, again, there seemed to be whole sections of description which were meant to make the picture crystal clear, and only left it smudged and foggy.

I've talked to people who have misgivings reading books in translation and usually I find it unfortunate. If you only speak English, most of the best books out there you're going to have to read in translation. And, generally speaking, the quality of literary translators is pretty high. But when I realized that both Abe books I've read so far were translated by the same person, I started to get a feel for what was going on in the books that I was having a hard time with. Now, the translations do read fine, and one gets a feel easily for what is going on in the book (I don't think the translation would be published if otherwise), but there remains a certain hollow feel at times that keeps the reader at arm's length.

Unfortunately, this may go a long way to explaining why Abe hasn't retained a larger foothold with American readers. The ideas are good, and I did like both 'The Woman in the Dunes' and 'The Ruined Map,' but its difficult to become as drawn in to the story as is necessary when it feels as though the events are being described by an intermediary, as I often did reading these books. I'll keep an eye out for alternative translations, and if this changes my opinion I'll make a note of it here. With such potentially powerful books, I'd hate to see him just fade into obscurity in America because of no fault of his own. Otherwise, I'd be curious to know if anyone had similar experiences to my own with Abe.

My Lobotomy (Dully)

A few years ago I heard Howard Dully's program 'My Lobotomy' on NPR and was, quite honestly, amazed by it. Mr. Dully was lobotomized at age 12 by Dr. Walter Freeman, the man who popularized the frontal lobotomy surgery and who performed nearly 3,500 lobotomies himself, many performed while touring the country in his "Lobotomobile" (this is not made up). Despite his lobotomy Dully seemed fairly well put together, albeit a bit emotionally compressed, in the program. He talked about the fact that he was never told that he would be lobotomized, and never given any explanation as to why it happened. One day he was taken to the doctor and when he woke up the procedure had been performed on him.

I think when most people imagine a man lobotomized they immediately think of Jack Nicholson shuffling down the night hallways of the asylum in 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,' essentially a vegetable. I'll admit that I too thought the procedure reduced all its recipients to a similar state, so it is an incredibly strange, and very haunting thing to hear a man so clearly in control of his faculties explain how the entire thing happened to him.

After hearing the program I was, for a while, incredibly interested in lobotomy. This eventually resulted in the Hard Girls song 'The Orbitoclast.' But I didn't actually become interested in reading Mr. Dully's book about his life until I found out something that I somehow missed during the radio program: he is from, lived in, and still lives in the south Bay Area--much of his life spent in San Jose.

For some time I have been considering the extreme lack of a literature of San Jose. In fact, much of the Bay Area is completely without its due presence in the literary world. I couldn't even begin to count the amount of books on New York, and I have no desire to try. New England has been written on to death. LA received its literary identity largely through noir and has also managed some interesting other perspectives. San Francisco and Berkeley do get occasional nods, but much of this area is treated as though it doesn't exist, or as though nothing happens here. San Jose is the 10th largest city in the United States and no one has anything to say about it? Most of this, I'm sure, is due to the fact that publishers are all continuing to look at that tired Manhattan skyline because they are so used to it.

Howard Dully, though, through his incredible tragedy, has published a book which is steeped in the feel and space of San Jose and its environs. His life was incredible sad and wrought with difficulties which didn't quite begin with the lobotomy, but certainly didn't end with it. If you're interested in non-fiction then its definitely worth a look. I'm hoping that it will be the first crack in the shell surrounding San Jose in literature.

We Are Real

Friends, I have added a feature to the sidebar that will allow you to order zines I've made, in case anyone is interested. Right now there is only one: a 20 page zine for the fellow fan of horror movies and getting creeped out. It was made for a recent zine show in San Jose. I plan on making a few more in the coming months. If there are any problems with the paypal button, or if you order it and don't receive it soon, please let me know. This is my first time doing something like this so it may take a little while to iron out the kinks.