Days of Future Passed

Paul Bowles and the Heyday of Hipness

Abstract

Michael L. Shuman reviews Raj Chandarlapaty’s Re-creating Paul Bowles, the Other, and the Imagination: Music, Film, and Photography (Lexington), which he calls the most comprehensive evaluation to date of Bowles’s eclectic output. Starting from Mailer’s claim that Bowles opened the world of Hip, Shuman follows Chandarlapaty’s readings of Bowles’s compositions and their anticipation of rock music, his Moroccan photography, Bertolucci’s film of The Sheltering Sky, and Sara Driver’s adaptation of “You Are Not I.” He finds a link to the Rolling Stones unconvincing but credits the study with showing how Bowles’s extra-literary work supports his fiction.