The Echo

About six months ago I started up a Short Story Group -- like a Book Club but with short stories. And cocktails. I've had a love-hate relationship with the group. I love the stories, have gotten to know some interesting women and I love the staff and back room at the bar we gather at. I hate the flakiness of Internet people who keep signing up for events and never attend and can't seem to ever get their hands on a real, live paper book and want you to scan everything and post it online for them.

One of the best parts of the group though is reading authors suggested by other women in the group that I likely would not have picked on my own. I was sure I would not be interested in Murakami but really loved some of his stories. This month, when we decided on Paul Bowles, I was disappointed. It didn't sound like my kind of thing. I have not read The Sheltering Sky and I'm kind of a "western" snob stick in the mud. I didn't want to read about Morocco. I like little stories with simple but powerful interactions between characters. I don't like reading long descriptions of banana leaves and balmy nights. For the first time, I ordered the book through ILL instead of getting a used copy on Amazon. I was sure I wouldn't want to have it in my collection.

I've been so excited to like these stories! I just finished The Echo, written in 1946, about a young woman who goes to visit her mother and her mother's female companion in Colombia. The way he built a growing dislike for one of the characters before she even says a word is great. And I like his ability to write interesting female characters (I also love that about William Trevor). So many of the male writers we've read (Murakami, Richard Russo, Cheever) have a lot of flat and interchangeable women characters. To be fair, some of the women authors we've read are very female-centric and have undeveloped men. I've been hyper-sensitive to this as I read because my own writing is in a big rut with female main characters who come from the same time, place and world that I do. I find that boring and predictable but difficult to change.

I decided to do some poking around about Bowles, first in the introduction to the book and then online. He not only knew one of my all-time favorite artists (Kurt Schwitters) but he also was a composer and wrote music criticism. There is a collection of his articles available called Paul Bowles on Music ( University of California Press, 2003). I'd be interested to read some of the articles about Folk music but would be a lost in the Jazz and Classical criticism. I think I will look at a collection of his letters and watch one of the documentaries about his life and work though.