Two Years Beside the Strait

In Two Years beside the Strait, Paul Bowles breaks a long silence to write about his personal life in Tangier, This journal, covering the period 1987 to 1989, reveals Bowles at his most interesting and direct. Whether writing of a visit by the American novelist Patricia Highsmith, or of a rare - and fleeting - visit of his own to appear on the Parisian television programme Apostrophes, Bowles writes with a compelling honesty and a probing intelligence. Dinner with Bernardo Bertolucci, in Tangier to discuss the filming of Bowles's classic novel The Sheltering Sky, turns into a raucous event, while a late-night encounter with Rolling Stones Mick Jagger and Keith Richards proves a more subdued affair. But it is at Malcolm Forbes's seventieth - and last -birthday party, an extravaganza attended by Elizabeth Taylor and 900 other guests, that Bowles's quiet observations come to the fore. We see the event not through the eyes of the Fleet Street rat pack, but as the distillation of a major twentieth-century writer.