Product Description

Let It Come Down, with its title from Macbeth, tells the story of Dyar, a New York bank clerk who throws up his secure, humdrum job to find a reality abroad with which to identify himself, and his macabre experiences in the inferno of Tangiers as he gives in to his darkest impulses. Rich in descriptions of the corruption and decadence of the International Zone in the last days before Moroccan independence, Bowles's second novel is an alternately comic and horrific account of a descent into nihilism.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #123378 in Books
• Published on: 2009-12-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

About the Author
Born in New York in 1910, Paul Bowles is considered one of the most remarkable American authors of the twentieth century. He studied music with composer Aaron Copland before moving to Tangier, Morocco, with his wife, Jane. His first novel, The Sheltering Sky, was a bestseller in the 1950s and was made into a film by Bernardo Bertolucci in 1990. Bowles's prolific career included many musical compositions, novels, collections of short stories, and books of travel, poetry, and translations. As well as running travel classics publisher Eland, Barnaby Rogerson has written, amongst books, A Traveller's History of North Africa (Weidenfeld, 1998), and put together several collections: one of Moroccan travel literature, Marrakech, the Red City (Sickle Moon, 2003), a pocket edition of English Orientalist verse, Desert Air, and a collection of contemporary travel writing, Meetings with Remarkable Muslims (Eland 2005).

Customer Reviews

An energizing reading and a disturbing image.
It's a raw image of human relations presented by Bowles, in his clear descriptions, about an american caracter dealing with the fact that his western values become pointless and obsolete upon his arrival in Tangier. In a traditionally Islamic country, the city is divided in three different colonized areas, english, spanish and french, altogether called the international zone. As natives aknowledge the urge for independence, they do as much to currupt the imposed systems and make then cahotic. Illegal activities run the place leaving no room for the ingenuous Nelson Dyar, to fulfil his expectations of getting a job and start a better life. Exciting and disturbing.

Astonishing...if you like that sort of thing.
The blurb on the back cover does this book no justice at all. My (low) expectations were blown out of the water by a book that began in comic 50s style (a la "Lucky Jim" visits North Africa) with a bank clerk fleeing his dull but secure job to Tangiers.
After a dose of half-hearted hedonism, the book slowly but surely turns into black hole of nihilism. Think Camus. Think Battle of Algiers. That sort of thing.

Let it come down
I rarely give five stars to books but this is an incomparable piece of art. The back cover (of my copy anyway) describe this as a thriller but you know that Bowles wouldn't write just a simple thriller and it isn't in any way simple. This is a story of Dyer who is lost in NY and comes to Tangier only to lose everything including his identity and ultimately his mind. But through this loss, he discovers something too. Something which can only be found when in solitude in deepest Morocco. Bowles again shows off his local knowledge of Morroco and treats us to some understanding of the rich and varied Arabic culture.