The Dream at the End of the World: Paul Bowles and the Literary Renegades in Tangier - Hardcover

Green, Michelle

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060165715 ISBN 13: 9780060165710

Publisher: Harpercollins, 1991

Synopsis

Profiles the literary renegades and fellow travelers who followed Paul and Jane Bowles to Tangiers, during the 1950s and 1960s, searching for inspiration, sex, drugs, and escape from "civilization"

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

More a nightmare than a dream, the Tangier that Green (a senior writer for People magazine) depicts so vividly here attracted an international collection of expatriate artists, writers, aristocrats, disaffected rich and their parasites, lovers, criminals, addicts--all drawn by a free-money market, inexpensive living, and a permissive atmosphere. In 1947, Paul and Jane Bowles, talented writers, homosexuals, and married--``famous among the famous,'' as Gore Vidal claimed, but otherwise unknown--found a refuge in Morocco's exotic blend of worldly pleasures, decadence, spirituality, and occult. Over the next 40 years, they were joined or visited by Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Timothy Leary, Susan Sontag, Mick Jagger, New York intellectuals, European aristocrats, and American heiresses such as Barbara Hutton and her various consorts. While rioting and civil upheaval brought independence to Morocco in the 50's, the sybaritic expatriates, their activities only partly curtailed by new restrictions, wandered about the Casbah, Casablanca, Marrakech, and the Sahara, gathered periodically at the Parade bar, exchanged sexual partners, experimented with drugs, and created an entire culture of their own, hallucinatory and brutal, where deviance, eccentricity, extravagance, even insanity were the norm. Here Burroughs, living in a male brothel he called ``Villa Delirium,'' wrote ``routines'' that his friends, particularly Ginsberg, gathered into Naked Lunch, and Bowles wrote The Sheltering Sky, an autobiographical fiction that remained a cult novel until popularized by the 1990 film version that Bowles narrated. Working from letters, book reviews, and conversations, Green captures the pace, vitality, and immediacy of a good gossip, and the dynamics of time, place, people, and style that comprise cultural history. She also offers an enlightening context for the 1989 Malcolm Forbes birthday party that drew Henry Kissinger, William Buckley, and Barbara Walters to this ``depraved Eden'' at the end of the world. Entrancing history, then--and there is a great novel to be made of all this. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Library Journal

In this prodigiously researched and richly detailed book, Green recounts the sojourn of Paul and Jane Bowles in decadent yet alluring Tangiers. Effectively rendering in pointillist prose the artists and writers, the ultra-rich and demi-mondaine who thronged the sunbaked medina at the height of Tangiers's popularity in the Fifties and Sixties, Green offers a rush of shifting alliances and perverted pleasures as compelling as the events of a swift-paced novel. But ultimately she fails to bring the Bowleses to life, having neglected to plumb their reasons for fleeing respectable America and enjoying (or, in Jane's case, enduring) an unorthodox, sometimes tortured existence in northern Africa. Green simply plunges into their life in Tangiers without background or introduction, leaving the reader feeling somewhat abandoned, and further offers only the sketchiest information on Tangiers's history and political situation. Still, her prose is as seductive as Tangiers itself, and her book will appeal to fans of the Bowleses or their intellectual milieu.
-Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harpercollins
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0060165715
• ISBN 13: 9780060165710
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 381