Two Serious Ladies

by Jane Bowles

Book Overview

Two Serious Ladies is the only novel by avant-garde literary star and wife of legendary writer Paul Bowles--a modernist cult-classic, mysterious, profound, anarchic, and funny, that follows two upper-class women as they descend into debauchery--updated with an introduction by Claire Messud, bestselling author of The Emperor's Children and The Woman Upstairs. Two serious ladies who want to live outside of themselves, Christina Goering and Frieda Copperfield...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 006228312X
• ISBN13: 9780062283122
• Release Date: February 2014
• Publisher: Ecco Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

One of my favorite novels

This is fiction for persons who can accept of their fiction the same things they expect of life: slipping, sliding, blind-turning, colliding, parting, bewilderment, and a great deal of sly humor. Life does not dole out sane rational narratives. The eternal mystery is why people expect fiction to do so. Does fiction for them represent a means of imposing form on life?

I like it

Two serious ladies is a very strange book. The first time I read it I didn't quite undestand it but it caught me instantly. Jane Bowle's style is amazing. Circles and circles of rare relationships, quear people, exotic and everyday's ambients, perfect sentences, subtle humour forms this authentic masterpiece.Once read, it will stay in your mind. Why do these women behave as they do?, what is Bowles triying to tell us? It's all crypt. You can read it and read it all over again and again and your conclusions will change.Bowle's other writing (a play and short fiction)has the same quality: refreshing, new, modern. Nothing you will read will present you such an original brain. After all our tradition is that of sinners

Two Serious Ladies

With shrewd wit, candour and a touch of the bizarre, Two Serious Ladies follows the demise into debauchery of two very dissimilar yet equally stodgy women, who aquire a fondness for eccentric personages. Christina Goering - rich, saintly spinster - turns high class call girl, whilst Frieda Copperfield - caught in a respectable, though staid marriage - abandons her husband for Pacifica, a Panamanian prostitute. The restless, autonomous, asexual female seeking self determination independent from men is a poignant theme which Jane Bowles explores with remarkable cleverness, hilarity and ruthless originality.Two Serious Ladies is a marvellous example of Jane Bowles' extraordinary talent as a writer of contemporary fiction - often obscured by her small literary output and the talent of her husband, writer Paul Bowles ... unfortuately so.