These are four tales of contemporary life in a land where cannabis,
rather than alcohol, customarily provides a way out of the
phenomenological world. Thus, of the men in these stories, Salam uses
suggestions supplied by smoking kif to rid himself of a possible enemy.
He of the Assembly catches himself up in the mesh of his own kif-dream
and begins to act it out in reality; Idir's victory over Lahcen is the
classical story of the kif-smoker's ability to outwit the drinker. Driss
the soldier, with aid of kif, proves the existence of magic to his
enlightened superior officer. For all of them the kif-pipe is the means
to attaining a state of communication not only with others but above all
with themselves.
His work is art. At his best Paul Bowles has no peer. --Time
[W]riters and artists such as Williams, Jack Kerouac, Francis Bacon,
Christopher Isherwood, Truman Capote, William S. Burroughs and Allen
Ginsberg to Tangier. . .sought Bowles as an oracle, a writer whose work
demonstrated its author as an original who saw farther, deeper, and
clearer, and who refused to flinch.--The Australian
Paul Bowles (1910-1999) was an expatriate composer, author, and
translator. His other famous literary works include The Sheltering
Sky, Travels: Collected Writings 1950-1993, and Without Stopping
