![]() ![]() ![]() Around him was a litter of small objects: notebooks, pens, medicine bottles-everything within reach-a teapot, a cup, spoons, matches, and shelves with books and papers, some of them musical scores. To drive the dampness away Bowles had a sort of superior blowtorch going, a fizzing blue flame heating the curtained-off cubicle, where he was seated like a hawker in a bazaar, on a mat, back straight, legs out, because of a leg infection. I found him sitting on the floor of a back room in a large chilly apartment in a gray building on a back street in Tangier. I know this to be true because I was one of the people pestering him when he was that great age. Even in his eighties he was pestered about details in the novel. So at the age of 38 he was defined, and that definition dogged him for the rest of his life. ![]() The Sheltering Sky was Paul Bowles’s first novel, and although he honed his art almost to his dying day-novels, poems, stories, translations, as well as musical scores-it was this strange, uneven, and somewhat hallucinatory novel, and a handful of disturbing short stories written around the same time, that seemed to locate his fictional vision for good in the minds of his readers. ![]()
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