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Let It Come Down: A Novel
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780061137396
ISBN: 0061137391
Label: Harper Perennial
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 304
Publication Date: November 01, 2006
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Release Date: October 31, 2006
Studio: Harper Perennial
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Editorial Review: In Let It Come Down, Paul Bowles plots the doomed trajectory of Nelson Dyar, a New York bank teller who comes to Tangier in search of a different life and ends up giving 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.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Europeans and Arabs.
Paul Bowles had already established himself as an American composer when, at the age of 38, he published 'The Sheltering Sky' and became one of the most powerful writers after world war two. By the time of his death in 1999 he had become a legendary writer. From his base in Tangier he produced novels, stories, and travel writings. Bowles describes collisions between 'civilized' exiles and unfamiliar societies. In fiction of slowly growing menace, he achieves effects of horror and dislocation.
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Rating: - Tangier Noir
What would you do if you were dropped into the middle of a small Moroccan town with a briefcase full of embezzled currency under your arm in bills too big to change, not speaking the language, high on kif, marked as a foreigner, lost in the streets & unable to ask for help for fear the police will discover you sneaked in illegally from Tangier?
That's the existential crisis "Let It Come Down" builds up to, and like Kit's similar predicament in "The Sheltering Sky," it turns out against ... Read More
Rating:  - A Promising Path...
Paul Bowles' Let it Come Down is a footpath into the woods which appears promising at its entrance, but eventually peters out. Our protagonist, Dyer, arrives friendless in post-war Tangier and quickly finds the love of his life (a prostitute), and his true calling (illicit currency exchange). He navigates past the expatriate shoals and the native doldrums, and experiences his first original thought (steal the money) when he arrives too late at the foncier. You figure out "foncier" from context, but the ... Read More
Rating:  - 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. ... Read More
Rating: - Bowles' Masterpiece is a frightening tale
I am a total Paul Bowles fan and this is the crowning masterpiece of his career. I wish I could give this novel 10 stars rather than just 5. Whereas Sheltering Sky and The Spider's House are totally excellent, Let It Come Down moves beyond them into the territory of the totally blank driftless soul with no meaning, a situation that Bowles shows is the most dangerous of all states of the soul.
The basic story is that of an American average young man, but beware, he is about as average as the frightful ... Read More
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