POINTS TIME

Lovely thin book capturing very short vignettes of a slice of Bowles' time in a Morocco pre-modernization. Buy it, tuck it into your back pocket and read it in those spare minutes between the frenetic action of this century. It will carry you back, for a few minutes, to a more tranquil but fascinating time.

Interesting if you are very familiar with all of Bowles other works. Short, but has merit for the historical anecdotes. Not significant.

Excellent!

geology, jewel-like stories, history -- dense, short, nearly poetry at times but never simply showing off.

Fairly well titled, the book collects small stories and parts of history to form a Polaroid like impression on the relationship between western European Christians and north African Muslims in a Moroccan landscape. One of the many charms of Points in Time is exactly the lack of a frame, of a recognizable structure. Even handling with concrete and logical situations, the narrative of non connected events in similar backgrounds has onirical qualities and resembles Bowles experiments with non-conscious writing seen in A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard. For those unfamiliar with Bowles it is perhaps not the best book to begin with; it would be like starting a seven course meal by the desserts.

A short novel of stunning concision -- liberating his work from the millstone of fixed character POV or time, Bowles jumps between vastly different ages (while maintaining his chosen setting: North Africa) with breathtaking fluency and a near- total disregard for realist conventions. This short novel, acclaimed by many as a masterpiece, ought to have inspired a revolution in storytelling: it is as explosive, in its own way, as Breton's *Nadja*. Instead, it simply sank from view. Some of the sections are only as long as a paragraph; others are bona fide short stories. But what endures in the mind is the way that Bowles' writing shifts, as if by magic, into the most voluptuous shapes.