The Spider's House: A Novel

For Bowles’s obsessive subject, to which he returned again and again, and which he wrote about brilliantly, was the tragic and even fatal mistakes that Westerners so commonly make in their misguided and often presumptuous encounters with the mysteries of a foreign culture.

Amar understands why his countrymen are “willing to risk dying in order to derail a train or burn a cinema or blow up a post office. It was not independence they wanted, it was a satisfaction much more immediate than that: the pleasure of seeing others undergo the humiliation of suffering and dying, and the knowledge that they had at least the smal

What Paul Bowles reminds us of, what he won’t let us forget, is that all of us, regardless of nationality or religion, are capable of acting from highly suspect, compromised, “primitive” motives—and of behaving in ways that, we would like to think, we could never even imagine.