Let it Come Down

by Paul Bowles

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 087685479X
• Release Date: January 1980
• Publisher: HarpPeren
• Length: 292 Pages
• Weight: 0.99 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.1" x 1.1" x 5.1"

Customer Reviews

Tangled up in Tangier.

Paul Bowles (THE SHELTERING SKY) lived as an American expatriate in Tangier, Morocco, where he wrote LET IT COME DOWN (1952). Set in the 1950s, Bowles' novel--reminiscent of Camus' STRANGER--follows Nelson Dyar, who leaves his mundane job as a bank job in New York to work in a friend's travel agency in Tangier, where he soon discovers that the agency is only a front for an illegal currency exchange. Dyar is a "wire-haired terrier" of a man--"alert, eager, suggestible" (p. 104), but he lacks brains and soul. Although he resides in an exotic city, Dyar, as his name suggests, is essentially already a dead man living a meaningless existence. "For years," Dyar "had gone along not being noticed, not noticing himself, accompanying the days mechanically, exaggerating the exertion and boredom of the day to give him sleep at night, and using the sleep to provide the energy to go through the following day" (p. 177). Dyar describes himself as a "victim" (p. 8), and soon after his arrival in Morocco, Bowles' protagonist is victimized by the situational, exotic culture of expatriates, drugs, alcohol, and casual sex that permeates Tangier. However, Dyar is neither a sympathetic nor a likable character, who seems to live a separate existence. He falls into a meaningless relationship with Hadija, a young prostitute, who is also the object of an alcoholic lesbian heiress's affections. Perhaps much like his former life in New York, Dyar's life in Tangier never becomes a movement toward or away from anything, he only continues to live his "life for life's sake . . . in the meantime you eat" (p. 183), all of which results not only in a darkly intriguing novel, but a highly satisfying existential thriller as well. G. Merritt

Fear and Beauty...

Ah..It is so quintesential Paul Bowles. If you ever thought You could fill the boredom and tedium life often has to offer by jaunting off to find adventure in another county, Paul Bowles will show you the horrors of trying to run away from yourself. The main Character Dyar is only a half formed person who makes the mistake of throwing himself in the middle of a very unstable Morocco where all the other expatriots hiding out smell his weakeness and jump at the chance to take advantage of him for their own devious means. At first you feel pity for him but soon it turns to disgust. I don't want to give away the whole book, but know that though the plot is dark it is filled with insight and magnificent landscapes.

The Essential Paul Bowles novel

Ah, Paul Bowles, you fiend! In "Let it Come Down," all the paranoid extremes which usually lurk beneath the surface are stripped to the bone, and the freakish products of repression and misunderstanding take center stage. In this book everything that has characterized his stuff (deliberately paced descents into hell that sneak up on you when you least expect it--freaky, druggy, exotic psychological and metaphorical thrillers) is distilled, and instead of mellowing out the sting of his work, it amplifies the impact. It is the essential Paul Bowles novel. Bowles' narrative is the usual "not-as-much-of-a-stranger-as-he-thought-in-a-strange-land" tale of misfortune, but this time, Bowles succeeds in making us eager for his hapless protagonist's fate. Dyar, an uncharismatic, unsatisfied, and woefully repressed New Yorker who accepts a job from a friend in the schizophrenic Tangier of the fifties--a city that doesn't exist anymore, and didn't when the book was first published. Bowles' Tangiers is a dirty and debaucherous, a big stew of misfits and expats, and he does this in his trademark smoky, sly atmosphere. Here we see where Bowles is taking us, and even though we're dreading what's in store for our self-absorbed, pathetic hero, we're looking forward to it nonetheless, and with evil glee. This is a good place to start with Paul Bowles.