A Distant Episode by Paul Bowles

Long before wide-eyed liberal arts majors like myself planned their summers around expensive two month trips to third-world countries, Paul Bowles was living like a local in Morocco, studying the music, translating the local authors and writing some of the most haunting prose of the mid twentieth century.

Before even the Beats and the Hippies had captured the literary imagination, Paul had taken the Bohemian, ex-pat stance farther than anyone had and embraced cultures, mostly Muslim, that were completely "alien" to the American mindset. In the process he became a composer, a translator and a timeless novelist and short story writer who inspired people as varied as William S Burroughs, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal.

A Distant Episode is an exquisite collection of some of his most famous short stories, stories that are like a glorious collaboration between Flannery O'Connor, Edgar Allan Poe and the authors of the Bible.

But Bowles is entirely his own, and when he's at his best, he captures, with great beauty and sensual subtlety, the sinister repercussions of clashing cultures and customs. He creates deeply flawed characters who are led astray in foreign lands, often places of great tropical heat and torpor. His anti-heroes and just plain villains are naive travelers who are forced to come to terms with some great evil inside themselves.

Whether priests, landowners, armchair philosophers, or "happy" couples, there is no escaping the howling abyss. In these stories people are violently disabused of their most cherished illusions. It always seems inevitable but Paul keeps you guessing until the very end just what form retribution will take.

Purely at the sentence level, I think Bowles is an unparalleled writer who crafts stories where each sentence is perfectly controlled, often starkly lyrical and capable of creating moods and tensions simply, for example out of the image of a crane alighting on a wet, sunlit bank. For writers, he is a model of what good prose should be, neither too minimalist or maximalist but achieving an astoundingly controlled rigor that only the best writers can pull off.

If you like this book, Red Hill has a worthy stock of other books by Bowles and about Bowles, and also by and about his equally talented wife, Jane Bowles.