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Up Above the World
by
Paul Bowles
On the terrace of an elaborate hilltop apartment overlooking a Central American capital, four people sit making polite conversation. The American couple—an elderly physician and his young wife—are tourists. Their host, whom they have just met, is a young man of striking good looks and charm. The girl, his mistress, is very young and very beautiful. Sitting there, watching
...morePaperback, 223 pages
Published
June 1st 2006
by Harper Perennial
(first published 1966)
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Paul Bowles is fantastic at turning a seemingly banal travel story into something of terror. This book and Sheltering Sky are both prime examples.
This time around a husband and wife are travelling somewhere in Central America when they meet a young expat who offers them kindness and alcohol and a place to stay. It seems like a fortuituous meeting for the tourists, but then the husband and wife keep experiences bouts of sickness that include amnesia as a side effect. The shift in tone...more
This time around a husband and wife are travelling somewhere in Central America when they meet a young expat who offers them kindness and alcohol and a place to stay. It seems like a fortuituous meeting for the tourists, but then the husband and wife keep experiences bouts of sickness that include amnesia as a side effect. The shift in tone...more
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This imperfect book represents a wish to choose works by authors completely unknown to me. Paul Bowles' world is possibly the literary equivalent of a Hopper painting. The lives depicted are as lonely as a Hopper character staring into the mid-distance from a road side inn. Written in 1966, this work is the possible hinterland for a Hopper character, a dark hallucigenic world in which two rootless middle class drifters appear to wander into a nightmare through simple lack of direction, and apath...more
My immediate reaction is ambivalence. I was annoyed and disappointed that the story little resembles the description on the back (or on this site), since the synopsis itself was intriguing. The narrative is choppy, and switching perspectives between 4 or 5 equally unsympathetic characters does little to involve me as a reader. The dialogue and characterization is sometimes clumsy as well. The ending twist is rather fantastic and implausible, but it has me considering a re-read for the near f...more
Mark
rated it
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review of another edition
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review of another edition
Recommends it for:
Most people, I think.
Recommended to Mark by:
Adam
Shelves:
fiction-novel
There's something about post-colonial Latin America as a setting. Maybe it's the perspective of the curious post-colonial outsider. There's always an element of unpredictability, disorientation.
It all lends well towards setting up a story that doesn't have too stray too far at all from common experience in order to become absolutely terrifying.
It all lends well towards setting up a story that doesn't have too stray too far at all from common experience in order to become absolutely terrifying.
Up Above the World, published in 1966, is the last of Paul Bowles’ four novels; he continued to produce short stories and translations until his death in 1999. Bowles’ novels rarely vary from a formula that reflected his own experience as an expatriate writer: American travelers, frequently a couple, face cultural dissonance in a third world country, often leading to a fatal or horrific conclusion. In Up Above the World, a doctor and his wife traveling in Latin America meet an enigmatic stranger...more
read this in one sitting on the train from Portland to Seattle. I don't know why it has not occurred to me before how much Bowles' style is like Patricia Highsmith. This story, about a couple traveling in Central America and meeting a charming but disturbed young man, has all the hallmarks of Highsmith's work: mounting tension, characters mistrusting their own intuition, the randomness of the crime (yep, it could have been you!), and general creepiness in the midst of normal everyday life. One ...more
There's one marvelous fever dream scene that has to be read to be believed but otherwise Bowles lost me on this one.
This was weird. Lurid, twisted, and quite confusing at times. Paul Bowles is able to surprise me, which is what keeps my head in his books, even when I don't know what the heck is going on. I love a dark story, and this certainly is one. It's also relatively short. Amazon.com sums it up well: expatriate-exotica....there is an insistent sense of mood and menace in this torpid, dusty, spiny landscape in a country somewhere to the south. One is never quite sure what is happening or is going to ha...more
So far, it's a little slow but I'm always intrigued by a story set in South America.
Part One introduces us to one set of characters and then Part Two, another. I wonder how they'll connect and when they'll interact if ever.
I've read some of Paul Bowles' short stories, all set in North Africa which were an average of 3 pages long so this is quite different from my previous experience with him.
9/21/10 - Upon finishing, I have to say that some of the story was ...more
Part One introduces us to one set of characters and then Part Two, another. I wonder how they'll connect and when they'll interact if ever.
I've read some of Paul Bowles' short stories, all set in North Africa which were an average of 3 pages long so this is quite different from my previous experience with him.
9/21/10 - Upon finishing, I have to say that some of the story was ...more
Strange, dreamlike, almost a nightmare, but Bowles' writing keeps you entranced. I came away without affection for the characters, but respectful of Bowles' technique and the way he crafts a story.
Paul Bowles writes with control and clarity, but in this novel the flatness of his characters and the fuzziness of the plot, which is more or less 'explained' in the final passages, achieve little of note. Perhaps the book is best for its descriptions of the physical world, especially the radical changes one encounters in Latin America when traveling from the tropical coastline to the high sierra. At the novel's core, however, is an insistent focus on a certain kind of predatory, nihilistic ce...more
Loved this. Love Bowles' writing. Love the clueless American couple on their trip through Central America getting in over their heads ...
A dark and disturbing short novel I read in one dark and disturbing night. Reminiscent of The Sheltering Sky's unhappily married couple. In fact, nearly an exact template of that far superior novel (both in length and style), complete with a sinister mother/son duo encountered on the couple's wandering peripatetic travels in a strange and foreboding foreign country, a feverish episode while trapped in a sinister stranger's compound, and a misogynistic portrayal of the anxious, justifiably parano...more
Perhaps oddly I list this in gothic. But, I certainly found this to be a sort of South American gothic.
Richard Schave
added it
Up Above The World by Paul Bowles (1992)
God, this was weird.
Bowles desribes this as his attempt to write a thriller or a "Graham Greene type entertainment", well the results are absolutely freaky, but delivered so starkly and dispassionately that its absolutely chilling. Apparently rejected by a publisher on grounds of being "nihilistic", another interesting note is that the film rights were sold to this but no one every did anything with it, sad because I can see either Buñuel, Polanski,Orson Welles, or even David Lynch making a kill...more
1966
As with all of Bowles, this book is dark and deeply troubling. Again, as in all his books, I loved the vivid settings (this time an unnamed country in Central America) and the masterful control of tone and atmosphere (dark, claustrophobic, uncertain), but the plot tightens at the end into too tidy a knot. Not his best, though somewhat less unrelenting in its violence and darkness than "The Sheltering Sky."
I found this book like most Paul Bowles disturbing and compuslive to read. It chronicles how a perfectly ordinary couple, by mischance, get caught up in a murder whilst travelling in South America and how they are stalked,tortured and ultimately killed. I wonder if Ian Mcewan read this before he embarked on the Comfort of Strangers as the storyline has a lot in commmon.
I am alwyas taken in by Bowles' understated, nuanced style and his ability to subty yet realistically portray that so often overdone feeling of terror. However, in holding Up Above the World against his masterpiece, The Sheltering Sky, I find it fails in effectively releasing the climax after such a long build-up. The composer is still a master of symphonizing prose.
Bowles's "The Sheltering Sky" is one of my favorites and this takes up a similar motif--an American couple traveling in an exotic locale and meeting with disaster--but without the existential reflection and sense of inner conflict and doubt that you find in his first novel.
I really liked this a lot, until the end when it just hewed a bit too closely to The Sheltering Sky. Still, when Day sweeps the flashlight over Mrs. Rainmantle it is superbly chilling and the novel is full of moments like that.
This one has a few interesting scenes but the central plot feels a bit like a cheesy horror movie (ie. the "Hostel" series)
Well done, Paul Bowles. I wish I hadn't read this while traveling...
This is a very insidious and sickening novel.
I just didn't "get" this book at all.
second favorite bowles novel. not in africa like nearly everything else he wrote. same frightening themes.
Whitney
marked it as to-read
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Paul Bowles grew up in New York, and attended college at the University of Virginia before traveling to Paris, where became a part of Gertrude Stein's literary and artistic circle. Following her advice, he took his first trip to Tangiers in 1931 with his friend, composer Aaron Copeland.
In 1938 he married author and playwright Jane Auer (see: Jane Bowles). He moved to Tangiers permanen...more
More about Paul Bowles...
In 1938 he married author and playwright Jane Auer (see: Jane Bowles). He moved to Tangiers permanen...more
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“At some point in the night she had a dream. Or it was possible that she was partially awake, and was only remembering a dream? She was alone among the rocks on a dark coast beside the sea. The water surged upward and fell back languidly, and in the distance she heard surf breaking slowly on a sandy shore. It was comforting to be this close to the surface of the ocean and gaze at the intimate nocturnal details of its swelling and ebbing. And as she listened to the faraway breakers rolling up onto the beach, she became aware of another sound entwined with the intermittent crash of waves: a vast horizontal whisper across the bossom of the sea, carrying an ever-repeated phrase, regular as a lighthouse flashing: Dawn will be breaking soon. She listened a long time: again and again the scarcely audible words were whispered across the moving water. A great weight was being lifted slowly from her; little by little her happiness became more complete, and she awoke. Then she lay for a few minutes marveling the dream, and once again fell asleep.”
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