Yağsın Yağmur

by Paul Bowles, Suat Ertüzün (Translator)

Paul Bowles Yükseklerde ve Esirgeyen Gökyüzü adlı yapıtlarında olduğu gibi, bu romanında da zengin, gelişmiş bir Batı ülkesi vatandaşının hiçbir özelliğine aşina olmadığı yabancı bir ülkeye yaptığı geziyi ve deneyimlerini işliyor.

Nelson Dyar Amerika’daki tekdüze yaşamını geride bırakarak eski bir tanıdığının turizm bürosunda çalışmak niyetiyle Tanca’ya gelir ve şehre ayak bastığı andan başlayarak Tanca’nın yeraltı dünyasıyla tanışır: Barlar ve genelevler, erotik film seansları ve yasadışı parasal işlemler, şehrin aristokrat çevresinde yaşayanlar ve şehrin fahişeleri. Bunlar yetmiyormuş gibi bu tarihten kalma âlemin uyuşturucularıyla da tanışır ve yeni yaşamında heyecanlı bir şeyler olması adına olmadık işlere kalkışır.

Bowles, okurlarını bir solukta okunacak akıcı bir serüvenin içine çekiyor.

Genres: Fiction, Morocco, Africa, Classics, American, Novels, Literature

360 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1952

About the author

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 permanently in 1947, with Auer following him there in 1948. There they became fixtures of the American and European expatriate scene, their visitors including Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal. Bowles continued to live in Tangiers after the death of his wife in 1973.

Bowles died of heart failure in Tangier on November 18, 1999. His ashes were interred near the graves of his parents and grandparents in Lakemont, New York.

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read all of Bowles in a frenzy when I lived in Morocco, and I was 18 years old and it was the first time I'd seen anything of the world and the first time I'd fallen in love and all the other kinds of firsts that you have at that time in your life. His books have stayed in my head like almost nothing else I read back then – I only have to open them now and I smell thuya wood and the smoke from the snail-sellers and I see the hotel room of a girl I haven't seen for real in nearly two decades. And they still don't really seem to be part of any identifiable tradition, these books – somewhat Beat-ish but very different from the Beats that stayed in America, a voice both American and distinctly foreign, an expat's voice, deeply knowledgeable of other cultures but (unlike, say, Louis de Bernières, who I read around the same time) never allowing you inside those cultures: instead they are about alienation and the impossibility of any real cross-cultural understanding.

Most of all they are, to me, unique in their pitiless control over narrative shape, especially when this comes at the expense of his characters. His stories do not come together at the end like stories are ‘supposed’ to: they peter out in scenes of bleak, compositional simplicity – like woodcuts, or etchings, or the last bare notes on a musical staff. You feel that you've been left, staring aghast at tiny figures stranded in a vast landscape. At 18 I felt that The Sheltering Sky was put together like no other novel, and nearly twenty years later I still can't disagree. His short story ‘A Distant Episode’ features a spasm of violence as appallingly rococo as anything in American Psycho, but it also felt significant and real to me in a way that Brett Easton Ellis never even came close to.

And then there's Let It Come Down, the book of his that I admire most. Everything about it impresses me, starting with the title, and its source in Macbeth:

BANQUO: It will be Rayne to Night.

1ST MURD.: Let it come downe.

(They set upon Banquo.)

In his 1980 introduction Bowles describes the line as an ‘admirable four-word sentence, succinct and brutal’ – and his admiration at this combination of succinctness with brutality will become apparent in the novel's unforeseeable climax.

Along the way he does a lot of what he does best. This includes his descriptions of altered states, which are the best I've read. And this was important to me at the time, because I felt permanently high from travel and new experiences, and I had a constant feeling that the world was like one of those 3D magic-eye pictures that I was just on the verge of seeing – a feeling that Bowles captures very well.

Everything he took the trouble to look at carefully seemed to be bristling with an intense but undecipherable meaning: Daisy’s face with its halo of white pillows, the light pouring over the array of bottles on the table, the glistening black floor and the irregular black and white stripes on the skins at his feet, the darker and more distant parts of the room by the windows where the motionless curtains almost touched the floor. Each thing was uttering a wordless but vital message which was a key, a symbol, but which there was no hope of seizing or understanding.

He apparently wrote his toughest scenes while spaced-out on majoun, a sort of hashish jam that the magic-men used to sell in the souks when I lived there, laid out next to the ostrich eggs and the open vials of liquid mercury. Perhaps that is what gives his writing its strange quality of inhuman, distant brilliance. There is something cold about him – easy to admire, hard to love. But terribly underrated, really one of the most fascinating writers in terms of constructing a story that you could hope to read. The ending of this one hit me in the gut when I first got to it, and every time I flick through the climactic paragraphs I get the same feeling. Like all of Bowles's most memorable moments, it is shocking because it is impossible to understand. I don't mean the prose, which is always clear and sharp – but rather the motives, the aimlessness of what happens. He reminds you how unpredictable people are, how un-novelistic life is, how unknowable even your own behaviour can be.

[Jeffrey Keeten · Rating 4 out of 5]

”With each day as it passed Dyar had been feeling a little further from the world; it was inevitable that at some point he should make a voluntary effort to put himself back in the middle of it again. To be able to believe fully in the reality of the circumstances in which a man finds himself, he must feel that they bear some relation, however distant, to other situations he has known.”


Paul Bowles

Nelson Dyar is desperate to escape that wire cage he’s been working in for the past few years. When a chance comes to take an odd job in Tangier, he leaves the bank, leaves New York, in the hope that he will finally start to feel something. Wilcox is his boss in Tangier, but as far as Dyar can tell, he really doesn’t have a job for him. He seems to just want to keep Dyar on a string in case he needs him for something. Dyar has plenty of time to meet the cast of characters hanging out in Tangier, all seemingly with their own agendas.

In exasperation at one point, he says: ”Can’t anyone in this town tell the truth?” This betrays his own naïveté and inability to adjust to the environment he has thrust himself into. Tangier is a city in flux, and those who are there are not as interested in sharing the truth as they are in acquiring the truth. Deception is all just part of the game.

Paul Bowles takes the title of this novel from Macbeth.

Banquo: It will be rain to-night.
1st. Murderer: Let it come down.
(They set upon Banquo.)

Bowles is impressed with the the succinctness and brutality of those four words. It certainly has connotations for me as I watch Dyar make these horrible decisions that lead him one step at a time closer to his own downfall. The first step, he falls in lust with a sixteen year old, Arabian whore named Hadija. He wants to possess her, but so do other men and even a fat, American lesbian named Eunice Goode, who is intent on taking this girl out of Tangier. Hadija has a beauty that is tempered by a feral ambition to use what gifts were naturally bestowed upon her to advance her position in life. She will always be for sale and will never return the love that anyone lavishes upon her.

Dyar takes money from a Russian woman to be a spy. ”’R-r-really we ask very little,’ she smiled. ‘You must not have r-r-romantic idea this is spying. There is nothing to spy in Tangier. Tangier has not interest to anyone. Diplomatic perhaps, yes. Military, no.’” Oh well, then there isn’t really any reason for Dyar to get in trouble for taking money from a foreign government, is there? *sigh*

The lesbian American actually provides one of the most interesting descriptions of Dyar. ”She had liked imposing men, such as her father had been. This one was not at all distinguished in appearance. He did not look like an actor or a statesman or an artist, nor yet like a workman, a businessman or an athlete. For some reason she thought he looked rather like a wire-haired terrier---alert, eager, suggestible.”

Daisy de Valverde, another American ex-pat, doesn’t really find him attractive in the way that she has found other men to be, including her husband. The men she found worthy of her attention were all powerful, assertive men. Dyar, in comparison, seems so passive. I don’t know if it is boredom or what, but she does seduce him with the help of Majoun, hashish laced, greenish candy. The sex is not exactly what she had hoped for. It is rather fierce and messy. ”She squirmed violently and managed to sit up, bathed in sweat, wine and grease. The air of the room suddenly seemed bitter cold. She ran her hand tentatively over her stomach and drew it back, disgusted.”Bowles is not explicit with the details of this sexual encounter, but this description gives us a better perception of what occurred than if he had written us a grope by grope play by play. I really liked Daisy and so I was disappointed in her for seducing Dyar because I appreciate her sophistication and tasteful regard for the finer things in life. There is not anything grand or even interesting about the vacuous Dyar. He is out of place in the bed of such a woman.

Wilcox does finally have a use for him, and Dyar rather ineptly decides this is his moment to break free and do something definable with his life. Daisy has an observation about him that sums him up very well: ”...you have an empty life. No pattern. And nothing in you to give you any purpose. Most people can’t help following some kind of design. They do it automatically because it’s in their nature. It’s that that saves them, pulls them up short. They can't help themselves. But you’re safe from being saved.”

A stinging last bit there, as if she is saying to him you are hardly worth saving.

I’m a little annoyed with Bowles that he doesn’t give me something to like about Dyar. I want to rip Dyar out of the pages of this book and insert myself. I keep thinking, what a wonderful opportunity this young dolt has, and he can’t stop himself from mucking it all up. He can’t even enjoy himself properly without expressing some dissatisfaction. He left New York to escape his life, but no big surprise he can’t escape himself. Regardless of my irritation with the main character, there is some beautiful writing. ”Thami began to sing in a small, faraway voice. It was a sound you could walk on, a soft carpet that stretched before him across the flat blinding desert. Ijbed selkha men rasou….”

Or how about this description?

”The soft endless earth spread out beneath him, glowing with sunlight, untouched by time, uninhabited, belonging wholly to him. How far below it lay, he could not have said, gliding soundlessly through the pure luminous air that admitted no possibility of distance or dimension. Yet he could touch its smooth resilient contours, smell its odor of sun, and even taste the salt left in its pores by the sea in some unremembered age.”



From what I know of Paul Bowles, he seemed a man always slightly adrift from life. He wrote only a handful of novels, but they are fascinating studies by a man who had to always keep in mind ”I must remember I exist.”

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[Agnieszka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nelson Dyar, young bank clerk thinks his life ran into the buffers. Being rather unreflecting and submissive by nature awaits that real life will come to him itself. His days pass on thoughtless and unsatisfying work so when gets an offer of a job from an old pal treats it as a godsend and opportunity to escape from his cage. In sudden impulse he throws everything and set off to Morocco in search for luck and own identity.

On the spot, contrary to all expectations, things don’t change for the better. Tangier these days with its International Zone is a place of dodgy businesses, Mecca for expats, adventurers and all kind of frauds and rich idlers. Promised job appears to be a vague chimera, met people try use him to own purposes, city offering forbidden gaieties draws him like shifting sands and so Dyar, alternately drunk and zonked, finds himself being thief and smuggler, traitor and spy. Not bad for a start.

Dyar is a tragic though not lovable figure. By whole years sneaks through life, automatically accompanies passing days, by nights gathering strengths to outlive another dull day. There is some strangeness and emotional emptiness about him, he's not agonizing himself about questions if such life is anything worth. Actually he’s not dead though the fact that he can breathe doesn’t yet make him alive.

Paul Bowles is really good at depicturing local colour. Tangier, as it emerges from the novel, is a strangely intoxicating, sombre, yet atmospheric place. A maze of dark and dangerous streets of the Muslim district, seedy brothels, crowded pubs where the locals in the haze of hashish to the accompaniment of drums indulge themselves in ecstatic dances, secret cinemas displaying illegally porn. Well, there is a rain yet. In Tangier incessantly rains ,the rain just pours from the pages of the book .

Bowles perfectly captures the dark atmosphere of postwar chaos drawing an evocative picture of a decadent city and its inhabitants involving in dirty games. Let it Come Down reads like ominous warning when disdain and arrogance of Westerners in contacts with other cultures leads to inevitable disaster.

[Edita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once more after finishing "Let It Come Down" by Paul Bowles I have become aware that some people are doomed to self-destruction and they rush there from their unhappiness and loneliness, from inability to adapt the surrounding reality, from consuming inside emptiness which tells them keep going from there. There is no escape from this horror of existence " a certain day, at a certain moment, the house would crumble and nothing would be left but dust and rubble, indistinguishable from the talus of gravel that lay below the cliffs. It would be absolutely silent, the falling of the house, like a film that goes on running after the sound apparatus has broken." Together with us the time will slowly dissolve falling to pieces and nobody would care that once " there were places in time to be visited, faces to forget, words to understand, silences to be studied", only the inhuman night will remain.
I am not horrified with the end of the novel, I knew I was reading Paul Bowles, I am not disgusted with the protagonist Dyar, I only feel pity for him and experience an immense fear of a fragile human soul that may break any moment searching for its place, "a definite status, a precise relationship with the rest of men" in a hostile world that we are responsible for creating ourselves.
I am amazed how through all the novel, the rain deciphers the coming events: it pours, rains heavily or calmly, it can rain indifferently or dip in a desultory fashion, it rains lightly bringing hope with a soft sound of falling, it offers watery sky, wet gray colorless twilight and in the end of the novel it produces the dead flat sound spreading around. The same is with the wind which blows from all the directions changing from a sweet breeze to a wind which carries the paralyzing promise of winter or a strong malevolent evil clattering the door.
I think I have learnt one simple truth from Paul Bowles: the dreamers can't be happy, you must have simple daily achievable goals to feel content just to be alive on a fine sunny morning, however, one thing is to realize it, quite another to try to turn your thoughts off.

[Jacob Sebæk · Rating 5 out of 5]

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence

How often have we not felt that a change of environment would be just the right thing. Escape all that ties you down, a new beginning, the chance to set everything right, get the recognition you deserve.
To most of us such change would be just a little premeditated, but to Nelson Dyar … it is just an escape.
Let it come down; the quote from “1st Murderer” in Macbeth is the equivalent of the fatalistic “Whatever!”.
You could easily take it forward to the next Macbeth scene when Macbeth tell us that “I am in blood. Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,. Returning were as tedious as go o'er.”
In other words, there is no turning back.

Arriving in the then International Zone of Tangier, Nelson Dyar, a former bank clerk, is supposed to take up a job in an acquaintance’s travel agency. A promising career in a land of opportunities.
The travel agency turns out to be just the fronting of a few other shadier kinds of businesses – and in the course of the novel we will know if Nelson Dyar is up to it.

But first we will get to know Nelson Dyar a little better.
Initially he is a blank card, picked up for a Celtic Cross Tarot session with the standard set-up, the first seven cards representing “This Covers You”, “This Crosses You”, “What Lies Below”, “What Lies Behind”, “What Lies Above”, “What Lies Before”, “Yourself”.
We are trying to establish who you are, what´s inside you, your dreams and hopes. Sadly, we see very little expect the most urgent physical needs. You feel attraction, even a kind of love, but you are not able to interpret these feelings.

Will a change of environment change a person? To some extent, yes.
Tangier just before the Moroccan independence, is a place where wolf eat wolf. The Brits, the French and the Spanish are upholding an internal cease-fire with each part struggling to gain and maintain as much influence as possible. Opportunities are there for the taking, provided your moral compass is not too tightly adjusted and you have the right connections – or you are born wealthy.
Either way, life can be easy if you know how to circumvent local legislation and you are not placed to far down in the food chain. But it takes skills, skills of the interpersonal kind which Nelson Dyar doesn´t have and thus he will inevitably end up as wolf food if not something drastic happens, the one chance that will change the game forever.

So, we walk out into the Moroccan night, looking for friends or alliances, builds ourselves an armor, because deep down we know that none of the people we meet can be trusted. We get drunk in the company of strangers, because only when we lose the control can we bear the knowledge that we are not in control at all. Even when high as a kite on several pipes of kif, the mind does not expand, it does not open new doors of consciousness, only highlights the vast emptiness.
Staying with Shakespeare; we may quote Hamlet´s last words; “The rest is Silence”.

Though it can be read as such, this is not a cautionary tale.
It is more of an observation, watching how a man with limited prospects interacts with a society that in all ways differ from his hometown New York. How he like an inexperienced spider on speed entangles himself in a net he doesn´t even see. How one step leads to another and signs are not read. Paul Bowles do not judge neither Nelson Dyar or the people surrounding him. They just happen to be there at a certain point and play a significant role. To a certain degree they influenced Nelson Dyar, and he could have made other choices, he could have stood up or held back, he just did not have it in him.

An enjoyable 4.5 read, generously rounded up to 5 stars, because I really like Paul Bowles and the pictures he was able to create in my mind.

[Luís · Rating 4 out of 5]

With Paul Bowles, finesse and gentleness lead us into a marvelous universe. Here is the meeting of the East and the West.
When the rain falls in Tangiers, and the wind is reminiscent of Africa, there is the magic of a writer. Admirable!

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

So often, synopses on the backs of books fail to capture the book’s essence; I expect this is usually by design, and probably understandable. But it seems especially true of Bowles, even if a phrase like “descent into nihilism” isn’t exactly wrong for this novel. Nor is it wrong to say that his novels deal with “the dilemma of the outsider in an alien society.” And I admit that I'm partial to Norman Mailer's blurb on the back of my copy of The Delicate Prey, although it's possible he was simply making campaign promises while running for mayor of New York: "Paul Bowles has opened the world of Hip. He let in the murder, the drugs, the incest, the death of the Square...the call of the orgy, the end of civilization." But having read three of Bowles’s novels now, I have found myself wondering what really compelled him to write them. This is just my speculation, obviously, but I think that his books are most crucially about describing certain states of consciousness- that is to say, communicating a fairly specific orientation towards life.

Maybe this is why a few of the reviews here claim that “nothing happens” in this novel. I completely disagree, even on the surface level, and I think that’s one of the things that makes Bowles a great novelist- that he doesn’t ignore the outside world, and that Nelson Dyar, the New York banker who tries to start a new life in Tangier, in a matter of days after his arrival finds himself caught up with pursuing a young Moroccan girl, avoiding a malicious American woman who spends most of the day in bed, taking money for services not yet rendered from a Russian spy, consuming a hallucinogenic drug with an attractive American socialite, casually observing that his new employer looks anxiously in both directions when opening the office door, etc. The point is that there's a colorful cast of idiosyncratic characters here, like you find in Dostoevsky, and that the inescapable realities of money, sex, and politics aren't ignored. There are plots, counter-plots, money and possessions changing hands, secrets, corruption, chance encounters in the street. But on the other hand, as in Dostoevsky, the real tension resides within the characters.

Characters in each of the three Bowles novels I’ve read are preoccupied with an idea that remains fairly consistent- that they are “outside” life, isolated as an individual consciousness. But what would it mean to get “inside” life? His characters sometimes get hints of an answer, usually contingent upon music or a desolate landscape. Take this scene of a character with the last name Burroughs (Bowles knew William Burroughs, and I’m sure there’s a story there) listening to music in The Spider’s House:

…she felt that the place represented an undefinable but very real danger. It meant nothing, never could mean anything, to Polly Burroughs. For that to happen she would have to go back, back, she did not know how many thousands of years, but back far enough for it to denote some sort of truth. If she possessed any sort of religion at all, it consisted in remaining faithful to her convictions, and one of the basic beliefs upon which her life rested was the certainty that no one must ever go back. All living beings were in process of evolution, a concept which to her meant but one thing: an unfolding, an endless journey from the undifferentiated to the precise, from the simple toward the complex, and in the final analysis from the darkness to the light. What she was looking down upon here tonight…all belonged unmistakably to the darkness, and therefore it had to be wholly outside her and she outside it. There could be no temporizing or meditation. It was down there, spread out before her, a segment of the original night, and she was up here observing it, actively conscious of who she was, and very intent on remaining that person, determined to let nothing occur that might cause her, even for an instant, to forget her identity.

Bowles’s characters exist in relation to a certain idea of eternity. Throughout their lives, there's ebb and flow- they are drawn to it and fear it, often at the same time; sometimes it seems far off and sometimes very near, capable of surging forth and obliterating individuality. But it’s out there, always, its transmissions to the soul as ambiguous as the blinking red light of a radio tower, exerting its mysterious effect, tugging at consciousness. It’s what an esoteric Russian fascist of the Silver Age might have called a “missing totality”, or what we might call nirvana, except that the mental image I associate with nirvana- a candle swiftly blown out- is too painless for Bowles. Pain and fear are inescapable elements in his stories. In fact, I would say he has written some of the most quietly unsettling scenes in literature, like the one where Port and Kit are looking out at the desert in The Sheltering Sky:

"You know", said Port, and his voice sounded unreal, as voices are likely to do after a long pause in an utterly silent spot, "the sky here's very strange. I often have the sensation when I look at it that it's a solid thing up there, protecting us from what's behind."
Kit shuddered slightly as she said: "From what's behind?"
"Yes."
"But what is behind?" Her voice was very small.
"Nothing, I suppose. Just darkness. Absolute night."
"Please don't talk about it now..."
"You know what?" he said with great earnestness. "I think we're both afraid of the same thing. And for the same reason. We've never managed, either one of us, to get all the way into life. We're hanging on to the outside for all we're worth, convinced we're going to fall off at the next bump. Isn't that true?"

Nelson Dyar in Let it Come Down has the same problem of not being able to get into life. He has worked at a bank in New York for over ten years, having been able to get the job in the wake of the Depression due to his father’s connections, and has been told he should be grateful. But what is gratefulness, anyway? His first act of violence is to leave his job at the bank for a job at a tourist agency in Tangier, run by an old acquaintance. Since, as Tobias Wolff wrote, Bowles’s stories “move with the inevitability of myth”, the reader never feels he could have done anything different. If it hadn’t been Tangier, it would have been Istanbul or Moscow. It’s like the story of Mr. Kurtz- being able to act with impunity brings certain aspects of himself to the surface...but they were always there, waiting. And so the real suspense in this novel is the sequence of mental events that takes place inside Dyar, which might sound very boring and abstract, except for how committed (or obsessive, depending on your view) Bowles is at describing these states precisely, lucidly. There is a logical consistency in how each slightly different state follows from the previous one; the mystery is what set the sequence in motion in the first place, which carries with it a whiff of the uncanny, of the dark matter we can observe only in its consequences.

For a while he sat quite still in the dark, with nothing in his mind save an awareness of the natural sounds around him; he did not even realize he was welcoming these sounds as they washed through him, that he was allowing them to cleanse him of the sense of bitter futility which had filled him for the past two hours. The cold wind eddied around the shrubbery at the base of the wall; he hugged himself but did not move. Shortly he would have to rise and go back into the light…For the moment he stayed sitting in the cold. “Here I am”, he told himself once again, but this time the melody, so familiar that its meaning was gone, was faintly transformed by the ghost of a new harmony beneath it, scarcely perceptible and at the same time, merely because it was there at all, suggestive of a direction to be taken which made those three unspoken words more than a senseless reiteration. He might have been saying to himself: “Here I am and something is going to happen.” The infinitesimal promise of a possible change stirred him to physical movement…

World War II is mentioned in only a few sentences in this novel, and here is one of the sentences: “They went off to Brazil, the war came, and they stayed there until it was over.” Does this mean that Bowles is, as Orwell described Henry Miller, “inside the whale”, pursuing his sick obsessions while ignoring the outside world? I don’t really think so, because Bowles, intentionally or not, in pursuing his sick obsessions, ends up capturing something about his era (and maybe ours, as well) that, if not wholly representative, seems to me at least significant. Dyar is tired of feeling like a victim. He’s overwhelmed by the burden of freedom and having to fashion a life out of a meaningless job that collapses time and suppresses his personality. A decade passes like a day. Any action- as long as it’s decisive and assertive, made with conviction- is better than this lifetime of passivity and cowardice. Lee Harvey Oswald might have felt the same way. Bowles’s presentation of a character whose options to interact with the world are reduced to two poles- sadism or masochism, to act or be acted upon- reminds me of Steps by Jerzy Kosinski (which is also, I believe, about the feeling of lost human agency in the wake of World War II). I’m also reminded of Erich Fromm’s idea, in Escape from Freedom, that sadism and masochism are two sides of the same coin, both mechanisms of escape; and that the need to escape was one of the reasons people followed totalitarian leaders like Hitler- the obliteration of the individual self in a mass movement (masochism), and at the same time permission to do violence unto others (sadism). I don’t know- could be someone’s idea of eternity.

Kosinski and Bowles are also linked in my mind because of the maliciousness of their respective visions of the universe. The worlds they created are more frightening than anything in Lovecraft; but just as the more a proprietor of an occult bookstore learns about the Old Ones the more insane he becomes, the simple fact that you have knowledge of Bowles’s vision is discomforting- because what if he’s right? The fact that the vision was conceivable, and that it is so persuasive and vivid, seems to make it more likely, somehow.

But while Steps is hypnotic in its voice, Let it Come Down is hypnotic in its atmosphere- an atmosphere that, a few days after finishing the novel, is still with me. I had the good fortune last weekend to fall asleep around 7pm and wake up at midnight. It happened to be raining. I went downstairs, made some coffee, opened the window, and read most of the last part of this book. The effect is hard to describe. I found myself staring at the coffee cup, listening to the drops of rain, slowly reading sentences like, “Up there was a city of little rooms, a city inside a pocket of darkness, but there were windows in the walls you could not see, and beyond these the sun shone down on an outer city built of ice.” Reading Bowles can have an actual physical effect- you feel that you are suffering with illness like Port in The Sheltering Sky, or under the influence of a drug like Dyar in Let it Come Down. Like Port, Dyar discovers what’s behind the sheltering sky, the fiction of his personality. Nothing…absolute night.

[Jörg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Let It Come Down thrives on the atmosphere of the international zone of Tangier in the 50's. It feels like a spy movie. From the beginning, it is clear that this will not end well for Nelson Dyar. A bank clerk who just arrived from New York in Tangier on a vague offer by a former classmate to assist him in his travel agency. His motivation is less in what expects him than in getting away from what he had. His new Western contacts are shady characters. It quickly becomes obvious that his employer wants to use him as a money launderer.

Fittingly, on his first night in Tangier, he meets Thami, a son from a wealthy Arab family who succumbed to alcohol and drugs which led to his being ousted from home. With him, he lands in a porn cinema playing a movie featuring promiscuous nuns. Later on, he meets the underaged Arab prostitute Hadija in a dubious bar, Thami leads him to. On that night, he and Hadija arrange to meet again for a picnic the following weekend. She quickly becomes his only obsession.

Nelson Dyar is a curious hero. He says of himself that he never was one to make things happen. He's passive, he's watching his environment as if he is not part of it. He drifts with the flow and lets things happen to him. He isn't clear yet about it but he is trying to get lost. With this mindset, he gets hired as a spy for Russia, not offering any resistance.

When the American Legation gets put on his tracks as a spy by an elderly American woman who sees Hadija as her protegée and the money laundering doesn't go according to plan, he's more driven into absconding with the case full of money rather than actively deciding on this. It so happens that he has sex under the influence of majoun (hashish candy) with wealthy and married Daisy while on the run, reaching a short moment of complete emptiness, his personal nirvana.

Dyar is following up on this notion by increasingly getting lost - twofold. Physically, moving deeper into the unknown valleys of the Rif on his flight aided by Thami. Mentally with the aid of hashish and majoun, descending into paranoia, losing touch with reality. Bowles' experience of life? The Sheltering Sky featured a similar detachment from the known world.

The novel had its lengths before culminating in a forceful and satisfying unexpected finale. I was a bit undecided on my rating for this. On the one hand, it was too much of a thriller for my taste. On the other hand, the atmosphere is engrossing and there are a lot of memorable well-drawn characters. In the end, the characters and Nelson's cataclysmic journey into the unknown won out.

[Mariel · Rating 4 out of 5]

If only existence could be cut down to the pinpoint of here and now, with no echoes reverberating from the past, no tinglings of expectation from time not yet arrived!

A man inprismed in his waiting life to happen to him. The standing on your feet in a cage day after day turning into a decade never happened. He knew he couldn't get it back in a mind place that doesn't touch get up and live your life. One day the sun didn't set on maybe tomorrow I'll do that thing that's going to change it all. I know this too well in my "Maybe I'll win the lottery even though I never play" or "Maybe I'll die before I need to" retirement plans. The all the other day after plans of not being like this yesterday's sun. Whatever happens to time when it's gone it's that kind of stale light of plans. Dyar has this as the battery of thirty something sun rises and sets. Quit the bank, roll away from the families. An armored armadillo ball . Hide from predators and somewhere else. So go to Tangier where an old family friend has started up a tourist business. I'm surprised that he did that much. If I knew him, I mean, I would be surprised that he ever did anything. Time stops for him. Somehow the contents of the fleshy genie jar retains its nothing shape anywhere.

The international zone of Morocco was time travelling like one of those ghost films and no one can read your lips and chilly ghost walk through them. The faceless foreigners can't exploit them anymore, maybe, or just one last fuck over. The neighbors will too, if they get a chance like some Christmas future after you've remembered a lifetime of bad karma you haven't done yet. No one trusts anyone. Maybe they shouldn't. It's like that switch you wait for when your soul is sick of belonging to you. Maybe there is something you can do, maybe like just waiting. A change. Hawk your turtle shell for nothing at the time. That non-friend friend non-business associate says he'll call him. Wait for him. What is he doing there, in Tangier? Walk around, wait, think and there for you are. It doesn't come to him. Just the hug from god is dead and nothing matters from the pipe. Nothing on his mind and his mind on his tummy. The meaningless smile on a hooker. They disappear into shadows of enemies in victim Dyar's what the hell is he doing here. I read the New York Times review from 1952. I don't agree with the writer that Dyar is a blank eyed cipher, exactly. He gets drunk on the sun. It isn't only the kif that unsettles his skin. Not moved outside of himself, maybe. I feel like he's a man imprisoned who doesn't know what the outside is, only that to be so trapped is a long way to die. An inhuman nightmare for feeling dead. A ghost story if you were already dead. When Dyar murders literally it is too late for him. I didn't feel connected to the murderer or the victim, it's as if it had happened such a long time ago that they'd be dead already. Something has already moved on without them and it's never going to happen whatever could happen to be born.

I thought Paul Bowles was brilliant when Dyar has already forgotten what he told the rich lady Daisy (in her butterfly's cocoon of money and socialite talkity talk) he wants from life. Truth? I have forgotten what he said he wanted too. If anyone ever asked me what I wanted out of life - I can't remember if anyone ever has asked me that - I don't know. Now I think Dyar said he wanted to feel like any of it meant anything at all. I would want to feel like I could breathe, pretty much. It's not all that important to me that Dyar was empty or not. Daisy thinks she might like him because he's empty (until she knows for sure). How could he be if he felt so weighted? I have forgotten her when she appears again, though. He's not weighted by her or any of them in Tangier, or back home as real people. Only like big bad history and future and a question that wakes you up when you thought you finally fell asleep. It's funny how much it felt like living his life with them until I had forgotten them. I didn't know I was going to be in a nightmare until it happened. Bowles really crept it up on me, kinda like getting used to Dyar's weight of nothing.

The feeling of unreality was too strong in him, all around him. Sharp as a toothache, definite as the smell of ammonia, yet impalpable, unlocatable, a great smear across the lens of his consciousness. And the blurred perceptions that resulted from it produced a sensation of vertigo.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶]

In which we are reminded of why it's important to only smoke hash with good friends, or even better yet, alone...

A life must have all the qualities of the earth from which it springs, plus the consciousness of having them. This he saw with perfect clarity in a wordless exposition—a series of ideas which unrolled inside his mind with the effortlessness of music, the exposition of geometry. In some remote inner chamber of himself he was staring through the wrong end of a telescope at his life, seeing it there in intimate detail, far away but with awful clarity, and as he looked, it seemed him that now each circumstance was being seen in its final perspective. Always before, he had believed that, although childhood had been left far behind, there would still somehow, some day, come the opportunity to finish it in the midst of its own anguished delights. He had awakened one day to find childhood gone—it had come to an end when he was not looking, and its elements remained undefinable, its design nebulous, its harmonies all unresolved. Yet he had felt still connected to every part of it by ten thousand invisible threads; he thought he had the power to recall it and change it merely by touching these hidden filaments of memory.

[Duffy Pratt · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's not clear to me whether Dyar goes to Tangiers to kill himself, or if he ends up killing himself because he went to Tangier. Either way, he is aptly named, and his story is both creepy and surprisingly unengaging. At times, I got the feeling we were looking at him like an insect on a pin. That said, Bowles writing is lucid, musical, and often powerful. I generally liked the characters, even with their indifference to all sorts of petty horrors. And I did like Dyar's spiral towards doom, and his almost casual acceptance of it. The book is basically a series of misadventures, each worse than the last, and the only question that remains is which one will finally catch up and do him in.

In general, I think Bowles fairs better in the short story than in the novel. He is capable of writing very powerful images and scenes, but somehow seems to lack the stamina to write a fully engaging and coherent novel. I liked this one less than The Sheltering Sky, but I think I will turn again to the short stories I haven't read before taking on The Spider's House.

[Andrew]

Living in Bangkok, you come to expect to run into elderly, alcoholic sexpats who have come to fritter away their lives and die in the arms of a woman half their age who are chomping at the bit to claim what's left of their savings. They seem remarkably self-aware and are more or less harmless.

What you don't expect are the younger guys in their 20s and 30s who came to look for a break from reality and ceased to live like humans. Dyar, the antihero of Paul Bowles' Let It Come Down, is one of these. He fucks up, time and time again, and becomes an absolute mess on a Withnail level, and like those disasters I've known in Bangkok, eventually realizes that he can't escape his own failings. That being said, it's nothing near as stunning as The Sheltering Sky, but it still has its high points.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

A grim noir that soon transforms into scorching existential journey through identity and reality. Post war Tangiers with its trash markets, spies, battling governments, debauched party people, drugs, criminals, and the clash of Muslim and Christian culture, makes a stellar background for this chilling tale from Bowles.

[Meltem Sağlam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yazarın, dört kısa öyküden oluşan “Avluda Yüz Deve” eserini evvelce okumuştum. Egzotik yerlerin atmosferini taşıyan metinleri, özellikle de romanları heyecanla okuyorum. Paul Bowles Fas’ta uzun yıllar yaşamış -89 yıllık ömrünün 53 yılını- ve son yıllarını da orada geçirmiş birisi. Dolayısıyla , ülkenin geleneklerini, kültürünü tanıyan, yerleşiklerin alışkanlıklarını ve olaylar karşısında tepkilerini çok iyi bilen ve bunları eserlerine başarı ile yansıtan bir yazar.

Bu romanı da Tanca arka planında, psikolojik bir gerilim. Varoluş bunalımı yaşayan kahramanın, kendisini bir ‘mahkum’ ve bir ‘kurban’ olarak gördüğü ortamından kopup, ani ve kendisine göre tamamen gerçek dışı kabul edilebilecek kararla, gerçekdışı olarak algıladığı bir yerde yapmak istediği yeni bir başlangıç sonrası, ‘İşte geldim ve yakında bir şey olacak.’ (sf; 158, 205) ruh durumu ile kendisini rastlantısal olayların akışına bırakmasını ve bunların psikolojisinde yarattığı değişimleri incelikli ve derinlikli bir anlatımda romanda işlenmiş. Hepsini merakla takip ettim. Biraz Tatar Çölü ruhu sezdim.

Paul Bowles, yazmış olduğu romanların konusu, kahramanları, atmosferi, dili ve kurgusu ile her açıdan çok sevdiğim bir yazar. Bu romanını da çok beğendim.


“… hala içi boşmuş gibi hissediyordu; kimse değildi ve olmayan bir ülkenin orta yerinde dikiliyordu. Burası düzmeceydi, bağlantılar arasında bir bekleme odası, bir varoluş tarzından öbürüne geçiş yeri ve bu yer şimdilik iki yönü de görmüyordu, hiçbir yeri görmüyordu….”, sf; 174.

[robin friedman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Letting It Come Down

Paul Bowles (1910 -- 1999) was an American loner and outsider. Bowles had a successful career as a composer in New York City, but in mid-life he changed to literature and moved to Tangier. After rereading Bowles' first and most famous novel, "The Sheltering Sky", I turned to Bowles' second novel, "Let it Come Down" (1952).

"Let it Come Down" is set in post- WW II Tangier, in the waning days when it constituted an international zone. During this time, Tangier was essentially lawless. It was a haven for expatriates with eccentric lifestyles including, for example, Bowles himself. The primary character in the novel is an American, Nelson Dyar, 30, who journeys to Tangier out of a vague feeling of boredom and dissatisfaction with his life in the United States. Dyar worked as a bank teller but had no real friends, love affairs, or interests. He moves to Tangier when an old acquaintance from childhood, Wilcox, invited him to join his travel agency, an inherently shady and questionable venture in the Tangier of the time.

Bowles' novel traces the gradual descent and change in character of the milquetoastish and indifferent main character. In its style, it is a mix. It has strong elements of humor and irony and in places almost becomes a comedy of manners. The prevailing tone is dark and brooding.

Through the hapless Dyar, Bowles offers a vivid portrayal of Tangier and its people. From the moment he gets off the boat, Dyar becomes emeshed in intrigue with other expatriates in Tangier and with the natives. His job with Wilcox immediately takes an illicit turn. The insufferably naïve Dyar finds a woman whom he takes to be the love of his life working in a brothel while she is also kept by a wealthy American woman. The book includes many scenes of parties among the wealthy expatriates and the more influential Arabs. The book also has scenes of narrow winding streets, dangerous bars, shabby hotels, and of the locals. Tangier in the book is incessantly drenched in rain. The book includes psychedelic scenes describing the use of hashish and kif, substances in which Bowles freely indulged when he moved to Tangier. With all the lightness of some of its parts, the book and Dyar's life descend inexorably into violence.

The book reads slowly. With all the action, depictions of place, and violence, the book includes a great deal of philosophizing about the need to let go of one's past and try to live and to enjoy life. Bowles' characters are trapped in their anger.

This second novel has the same broad themes as does "The Sheltering Sky" but is less effective in its long scenes of parties and expatriate society life than is the former novel with its unremitting starkness. The novel, nevertheless, is absorbing in its portrayal of Tangier and in its depiction of the face of a callow and initially unsuspecting young American. The novel is available individually or in a Library of America compilation of three novels of Paul Bowles.

Robin Friedman

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

But have you ever seen the back of a twenty dollar bill - on weed?

Half-Baked is the only "drug" movie I've ever been able to sit through. All the rest seemed like they would be boring as hell. Like watching paint dry. Which, I guess if you were on weed might seem entertaining.

LICD starts well. The characters are interesting, identifiable, the locale mystical, exotic. There's a lady with more money than she knows what to do with. I liked her. She spent most of her time giving lavish dinner parties, bored out of her mind.

Problems arose after Bowles introduced Dyar, the main character, to kif. From there, the scenes involved one Hey-hey-we're-the-Monkees...on-weed scene after another. I gather we were supposed to feel something for Dyar for the idiotic decisions he made. At first, when he was looking for something beyond the humdrum life he lead back in New York, I was right there with him. Hell yes, Brother Dyar, life can become monotonous. But when all he found to do was have some drug-induced daydream/nightmare after another, I could not have cared less. He got himself into trouble early on, and the only way out, it seemed, was checking out. I can understand checking out, but experiencing a drug-induced daydream is (I'm assuming) a lot more fun than reading about someone experiencing them. Near the end I turned on the Kindle's text to speech and had daydreams of my own as the electro-voice droned nearby.

And the detours. Holy kif crystals, the detours. The moment a scene became interesting, I believe Bowles recognized it, sought to destroy it. Felt like riding uphill in a jalopy with two flat tires.

From 60% on the book is closer to a one to two star read, but the first 50 was a solid four stars. Evens out to a middling, forgettable three.

[Stephen Durrant · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bowles novels are typically set in Morocco, where he lived for so many decades. The setting is meticulously and convincingly portrayed, but this novel, like his more famous "The Sheltering Sky," is not so much about setting as it is about youthful ennui and the desire to experience another world that might jolt one into a more authentic existence. In Bowles novels that place is Morocco in the 40's and 50's, but it could be just as easily any number of "foreign" environments. Almost all young people, I think, have sometimes desired this shift to another reality, and many of us acted on that desire, for better or for worse. But most youthful wanderers, especially those who survived, were neither as naive nor nihilistically inclined as Nelson Dyar, the protagonist of "Let It Come Down," who leaves his job in New York City as a bank teller (speaking of ennui!) to take up an unspecified and probably shady job in the very corrupt international zone of Tangiers. Soon he is clearly in over his head and finds himself in a place where almost all meanings and connections escape him. Or maybe he has reached that point Kafka once described (and Bowles quotes in his preface): "From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached." The premise and general curve of this novel is much the same as "The Sheltering Sky," but it is shorter and somewhat less complex, providing a good entrance into Bowles' dark vision of a world in which we are all just one step away from entering a very enticing, quite unknown, and perhaps even unknowable "danger zone."

[Gerhard · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is a pity that Paul Bowles' later novels, Let It Come Down and The Spider's House, were somewhat overshadowed by The Sheltering Sky, due to the movie adaptation by Bernado Bertolucci. (If there is any modern filmmaker that could do proper justice to Let It Come Down, it would have to be an auteur like David Cronenberg).

It is incredible to think that Let It Come Down was first published in 1952. Intense, provocative, frustrating, nihilistic and downbeat, it does suffer from the restrictions and attitudes of its social milieu - particularly with regard to the sex scenes, which haunt the margins of the text - including a lesbian relationship, and a distasteful rape under the influence of hashish. There are a couple of moments of extraordinary violence at the end that are likely to haunt any reader days afterwards with their hallucinatory intensity.

However, it remains every bit as intense a read today, and its universal themes of culture clash, assimilation and alienation are equally topical today. The book addresses racism and xenophobia head on. Indeed, it can be argued that Bowles' own ingrained racist and colonial attitudes are dismayingly on display with Moroccan characters like Hadija and Thami, who largely remain ciphers, with Hadija especially given cringeworthy lines like "no spicking Anglish".

Still, despite its flaws and the fact it remains mired in a set socio-historical context, Let It Come Down reminded me strongly of early Ian McEwan books like The Comfort of Strangers. It is clear that Bowles has cast a long shadow over British fiction. That he is not more lauded or cited today is very sad.

I find it fascinating whenever a writer tackles unsavoury or unlikeable characters, as this demands a delicate balance between repulsion and attraction on the part of the reader.

Well, everyone in Let It Come Down is unlikeable, from the curiously apathetic American Nelson Dyar to the motley assortment of expats lurking in the International Zone in Tangier, to a range of equally unpalatable locals. The ending, in particular, is a jaw-dropping exercise in narrative chutzpah, as Dyar succumbs to the logic of the particular path to dissolution he has chosen. Or which has chosen him.

This is a novel slightly damned by its author's bravery, because it is not entirely successful, and it is likely to turn off as many readers as it appeals to. Bowles is a master of mood and setting, and his descriptions of the natural and urban environments of the Zone - one immediately thinks of William Burroughs, of course - are masterly. It is a pity then that he resorts to such a hackneyed device as money smuggling to get the plot moving.

Nevertheless, this remains an extraordinary reading experience. I can only hope that a director with the energy and audacity of David Cronenberg would attempt to film this novel, and thereby bring Bowles back into the literary limelight, where he belongs.

Of course, Bowles would demur. His place has always been in the shadows, and in the deeper darkness behind.

[Max Nemtsov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Очень традиционный роман, второй по счету у автора, корнями уходящий в модернизм и «потерянное поколение» 1920-х, читается в параллели с «Посторонним» Камю (вышедшим на 10 лет раньше), и тем самым создается дополнительный стерео-эффект. Здесь такой же «потерянный» человек, традиционная для Боулза никчемная жертва на пограничье с чужой культурой, в ситуации, где не может быть ни понимания, ни примирения. Все безжалостно и безнадежно — полное отчуждение, и от себя, и от цивилизации вообще, и от окружающей реальности в частности, как и в рассказах. Боулз тут выглядит эдаким потерянным европейско-американским звеном между Хемингуэем, который не мог до конца оторваться, и битниками, которые не могли (да и не желали) до конца вернуться. В общем — другой штамм экзистенциализма.

Кроме того, это последний из не переведенных на русский романов Боулза — а переводить его дело безблагодатное, хотя очень благодарное в конце. Про язык Боулза много писали люди поумнее меня, и в этом романе как раз он, похоже, начал отказываться от языковых излишеств и «литературности», сводя текст к чистому изложению фактов, сухому и безэмоциоональному, убирая за текст любое авторское отношение к тому, что изображает. В итоге мы здесь видим зарождение того «нулевого градуса письма», с которым мы когда-то имели дело, готовя к изданию его рассказы. Здесь невозможно прикипать душой ни к кому, здесь автор сознательно вышибает у читателя любые костыли, которые могли бы помочь этому читателю хоть сколько-то увлечься происходящим (а если не детективная, то плутовская интрига в романе присутствует). При этом автор, похоже, только учится писать так, поэтому текст у него довольно неровный, и как только в нем возникает какая-то лирика (обусловленная поворотом сюжета), книга заканчивается. Текст дошел до естественной для него точки и просто прекратился.

При работе пришлось пойти на некоторый эксперимент (ну, попытаться) — несколько стилизовать его под язык «советской школы перевода», с его рыхлостью, вязкостью и некоторой грамматической избыточностью. Правда, еще предстоит выбрать некий фигурный рубанок, чтобы окончательно все обстрогать, а уже потом можно будет смотреть, что у нас получилось. Но это будет не сегодня.

[Arybo ✨ · Rating 3 out of 5]

E più considerava il misterioso insieme, più indecifrabile ne diventava il significato.


Grande scrittura, trama deludente. Personaggi pieni di potenziale, ma non hanno né inizio né fine (volutamente). Bellissime descrizioni di luoghi, momenti e sensazioni. È come una magnifica confezione che ha un dolcetto sciapo all’interno.



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Sono un po’ perplessa, alla fine di questa lettura. Il primo quarto del libro è volato, mi ha catturato con le sue rappresentazioni di Tangeri e della sua pioggia, delle stradine e delle scalinate infinite. Poi il testo si è assestato su un livello intermedio tra “bella scrittura” e “che noia, perché non succedere niente?”. Della seconda metà ho apprezzato poco, veramente poco. Solo le descrizioni dei luoghi e delle sensazioni sotto hashish hanno alzato la mia valutazione.
I personaggi non mi hanno fatto impazzire, le situazioni non mi hanno intrigato o interessato, andavo avanti nella lettura giusto per la scrittura, che è m a g n i f i c a.
Peccato per la trama, insipida. Probabilmente se avessi letto il libro più velocemente me lo sarei gustato di più.




Se si potesse almeno non pensare, anche per pochi istanti, se almeno si potesse cessare di preoccuparsi di tutto, ma veramente di tutto, come sarebbe meraviglioso. Ma ciò sarebbe probabilmente la morte. La vita trae senso dal preoccuparsi. È una lunga lotta per evitare di ridursi in frammenti. Se ci si abbandona al vero godimento, la salute va in rovina, e con la salute se ne va anche la bellezza. La vera cosa terribile è che alla fine, in qualsiasi modo si sia agito, per quanto si possa essere stati attenti, tutto è inevitabilmente destinato a crollare.

[Juliana · Rating 5 out of 5]

I know, I know--strange to be recommending a book I read more than 10 years ago (is it possible??), but this book made such an impression on me, it has stood the test of time.

I became fascinated with Paul Bowles in the early nineties, after someone loaned me a copy of The Sheltering Sky. There is something of the haunting power of the Other that pervades EM Forster's A Passage to India in that novel, but with a more existential outlook, unique to Bowles' narratives.

By the time I read Let It Come Down, I had a hearty appetite for the detailed descriptions of his storytelling.

It's like the descriptions of the protagonist's experiences in Morocco are a mirror of the layered circles of his consciousness. You go deeper, and deeper, and deeper--seeing how, in a place that does not know you, where you can become lost forever, and where potential danger hangs around every corner, can become the only place that you can be truly free.

Every seemingly scary moment, where the protagonist's very survival and self-identity come into question, become somehow liberating and beautiful.

I recommend it to anyone who likes a good story about the way people come to terms with themselves through the lens of an unfamiliar place.

[Christopher Sutch · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a gripping novel about an American who is wholly ignorant of the culture he finds himself immersed in. He was, however, also rather "empty" even back in America. This is pretty standard territory for Bowles, but this novel seemed to me to be a particularly existentialist novel in philosophy, something I had not considered that Bowles might have subscribed to (though, having just written that, it seems pretty obvious that he would have been; it was THE philosophy of the times). This is sort of a crime novel, sort of a travel narrative, and sort of an object lesson about the effects of markets and economics on some Americans. The ending shocked me with a fairly grisly turn, and I appreciated that. This is a good second novel, but also still clearly the work of someone becoming adjusted to a longer form of narrative than he was used to employing.

[Sophy H · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a slow burner of a story building to a very unexpected conclusion.

Bowles creates a steaming, sultry, atmospheric Tangier, into which the protagonist is thrown headfirst. His journey, which starts slowly, builds pace and like an avalanche, gathers bulk and momentum as he is lead down a path he isn't ready for. This storytelling is intelligent with peripheral characters who are as rich and multi-dimensional as the main character.

Seemingly little things happen that seem inconsequential until suddenly the latter part of the story creeps up and slaps you in the face!

Clever, moody narration which I really enjoyed.

[Monika · Rating 4 out of 5]

Zaskoczona jestem, jak bardzo ta książka mi się podobała. Nie spodziewalam się fajerwerków, a dostałam na jednym poziomie bardzo wciągającą, sensacyjną intrygę. Maroko w latach 50-tych XX wieku, narkotyki, przemyt, alkohol i imprezy wśród elit ówczesnego Maroka.
Na drugim poziomie to powieść z ciekawie wprowadzonymi (nie nudnymi) dialogami wewnętrznymi bohaterów, przemyśleniami na różne tematy. Widzimy też bohatera, który poddaje się wydarzeniom, sam nie steruje swoim życiem, tylko czeka co ono mu przyniesie. Można się zastanowić czym jest wolność, niezależność człowieka.
Porządna proza.

[Jose Garrido · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maratona de leituras Bowles para um artigo sobre Tanger.

[Katja · Rating 5 out of 5]

As summarized by many, book cover included, "Let it come down" is about a young man called Dyar coming to Morocco to find out more about himself and gradually getting more and more into trouble. A primary reason is that he mistakes his impulses for the "true self" and hopes to find his way by not thinking much about what he does. The fourth and the last part of the novel, which is almost exclusively about Dyar and his situation aggravated further by Moroccan drugs, was not as absorbing as the preceding three, presumably because it was all about a man pronounced "dead" quite early in the novel. So we all knew a bad thing was going to happen to him, no surprise there. I was more curious to find out where and how Bowles is going to say goodbye to his character. Will he be dead-dead or just mad? I won't be a spoiler.

The depiction of the international and native society in Morocco of that time is what made me like the novel so much. It's true that the story is mainly about Dyar but what really made me laugh and ponder were the interactions with and between other characters who, unlike Dyar, have a clearer idea of what they want.

[James Hartley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, atmospheric read.
I didn´t like it as much as The Sheltering Sky but I don´t think I like any book as much as The Sheltering Sky. This one is different, concerning an American banker who moves to Tangier and the International Zone before Moroccan independence and gets slowly swallowed up by it.
You can´t read Bowles and not be taken to Africa, to Morocco in this case, and feel, smell and hear it waft up to you from the pages. In this case the wonderful closeness of the sea permeates the pages - waves crashing, Spain coming in and out of view across the Mediterranean.
Good stuff!

[Michael · Rating 1 out of 5]

At the start of this novel I thought I was really going to enjoy the book, but I didn't. As the story evolved about a rather hopeless American guy who ends up in Tangier, I found the plot and the characters so unbelievable that I nearly didn't finish reading it. I did persevere only to confirm my total disappointment with this book.

[AC · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not nearly as good as Sheltering Sky - the characters are dull - and the setting inauthentic -- and cynical.

[Philip Fracassi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exotic and dark. Trippy and insightful. I literally felt like I'd been part of someone else's experience...like a dream that still sorta haunts me, and it wasn't even mine.