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Article: Paul Bowles: The Outsider of the Avant-Garde
- Article from:
- The Washington Post
- Article date:
- June 11, 1989
- Author:
CopyrightThis material is published under license from the Washington Post. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Washington Post. (Hide copyright information)
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AN INVISIBLE SPECTATOR
A Biography of Paul Bowles By Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno
Weidenfeld & Nicholson. 501 pp. $24.95
A DISTANT EPISODE
The Selected Stories By Paul Bowles
The Ecco Press. 352 pp. Paperback, $11.95
IN THE INTRODUCTION to the 1980 edition of his second novel, Let
It Come Down, Paul Bowles calls one of its characters, Richard
Holland, "a caricature of myself." Holland, it turns out, occupies a
mere handful of paragraphs in a book of almost 300 pages. So far as
he is revealed, he strikes the reader as a chatty cynic, but only a
psychic would feel confident of having fathomed him even as a sketch.
That in itself-the guardedness of Bowles' self-caricature-speaks
volumes ...