Description
Book SynopsisThis study argues that Paul Bowles is more perceptive than many American travelers in Morocco. The book provides us with what are perhaps the most sustained meditations to date on Bowles's translation work and his autobiography, as well as perceptive analyses of key stories such as A Distant Episode and Here to Learn and his second novel, Let It Come Down, set primarily in Tangier. The chapter on translation dwells on the complex interactions between Moroccan storytellers and Bowles. The work considers translation as a site where the oral and written, colonial and post-colonial scene, and English and Maghrebi come face to face; it is a place where things are worked out in dynamic interaction. The chapter on Bowles's autobiography Without Stopping, urges us to take this piece of self-writing (famously dubbed Without Telling by William Burroughs) more seriously, drawing our attention to baroque architectural features of mind and external landscape, worlds distorted by mirrors, dreams, an
Trade ReviewBouchra Benlemlih’s knowledgeable and theoretically informed study of Paul Bowles’s engagement with Morocco as a translator, short-story writer, novelist, autobiographer, and traveller-flâneur has helped us situate the American writer at the liminal threshold where allegiances and alienations, exteriorities and interiorities, Western and Muslim societies, are tied together through the mediation of this North African gateway. -- Paul Jahshan, Notre Dame University
Benlemlih puts before us things we may have noticed and thought about before, yet with her own inflection, keen insights, fresh perspective, and voice. Her focus here is on liminality—various kinds of liminal spaces—mediation, and in-betweenness. This approach is at once appropriate and fruitful, allowing her to explore connections between geographic and poetic space in Paul Bowles’s life and work. -- Allen Hibbard, Middle Tennessee State University
Table of ContentsForeword by Allen Hibbard Introduction – Realizing the Textual Space: Meta-fictional Speculations in Paul Bowles’s Work Chapter 1 – Moroccan Oral Stories: Translation and Mediation Chapter 2 – Without Stopping: The Memory of that Memory Chapter 3 – Selected Fiction: The Myth of the Fall into Modernity Conclusion – Morocco: Paul Bowles’ Peripheral Centre
