Days: A Tangier Diary

by Paul Bowles

Overview

Between 1987 and 1989, Paul Bowles, at the suggestion of a friend, kept a journal to record the daily events of his life. What emerges is not only just a record of the meals, conversations, and health concerns of the author of The Sheltering Sky but also a fascinating look at an artist at work in a new medium. Characterized by a refreshing informality, clear-sightedness, and passages of exquisite prose, these pages record with equal fascination the behavior of an itinerant spider, a brutal episode of violence in a Tangier marketplace, and the pageantry and excess of Malcolm Forbes's seventieth birthday party. In Days, a master observer of the foreign and obscure turns his attentions toward his own daily existence, giving us a startlingly candid portrait of his life in late twentieth-century Tangier.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061137365
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	06/13/2006
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Paul Bowles was born in 1910 and studied music with composer Aaron Copland before moving to Tangier, Morocco. A devastatingly imaginative observer of the West's encounter with the East, he is the author of four highly acclaimed novels: The Sheltering Sky, Let It Come Down, The Spider's House, and Up Above the World. In addition to being one of the most powerful postwar American novelists, Bowles was an acclaimed composer, a travel writer, a poet, a translator, and a short story writer. He died in Morocco in 1999.

Read an Excerpt

Days

A Tangier Diary

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By Paul Bowles

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Copyright © 2006 Paul Bowles
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0061137367

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Chapter One

Days

August 19, 1987

Clear. Walked to Merkala. The cherqi was violent, and raised mountains of dust along the way. On the beach hundreds of small children, hardly any adults. The boys were beating each other with long strips of seaweed. Constant smell of the sewage coming out of the conduit at the east end of the beach. Lalla Fatima Zohra was right to forbid the public to use the place a few years ago. But that was during the cholera epidemic. A letter from Paris saying that Quai Voltaire will not agree to letting me inspect the galleys of any book they may publish. I never asked to see galleys. I wanted to see typescript before it was set up in type. They called my request "legalisme excessif " Buffie found her two thousand dollars and passport, hidden somewhere in the flat.

August 20

Paid my last visit to the consulate, and was given the copy of my will, which they'd been keeping for me. Moving vans in front of the Residence. Afternoon brought a M. Jebari, doing a thesis at the Sorbonne. His first suggestion, La vie et l'oeuvre de Paul Bowles, turned down. When he called it L'horreur et la violence dans l'oeuvre de Paul Bowles, they accepted it. Ridiculous. Claude Thomas came by, resentful of the newcontracts Quai Voltaire have sent her to sign. I hope she doesn't eventually lose patience with them and refuse to translate any further works. I count heavily on her for Up Above the World. Bourgois writes that he expects her to take on the volume of Jane's letters.

August 25

Curious how difficult it is to sustain anger, once the initial flush of it is over. For three days L. has been coming here to spend the entire afternoon.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Days by Paul Bowles Copyright © 2006 by Paul Bowles. Excerpted by permission.
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