Finishing up Bowles

For me a Bowles story begins with a clear, sensory description of the setting. Many,if not all of his stories start with an undertone of depression, redundancy (for the character), and a sense of a dis-utopia. I wholeheartedly enjoy reading Bowles's scenery. Even if the context of the story is confusing to me or uninteresting,I still can feel the setting. As  Professor Talbird stated earlier, sometimes he doesn't know if he likes a story but finds himself thinking about it for days after. I love when a work of literature lingers. Bowles,for me, is so descriptive that his imagery lingers.

This goes hand in hand with why I pick A Circular Valley as my favorite reading. The story itself is odd, unique, and easily understood a thousand different ways. The scene when the Atlajala enters the friar is one of the two scenes that has resonated with me in this story. I can feel the fight and the pleasure the friar feels when this spirit enters him. I also particularly love when the friar has his arms open and he looks up to the night sky. The night is calm, the night sky is expansive, and the friar is one individual man who is having this internal struggle. This scene is lonely, loud, silent, and complex.  The other scene that stayed with me from this story was when the Atlajala enters the man and looks at woman for the first time. Bowles describes the woman as the most beautiful creation the Atlajala has ever seen and Bowles in that paragraph goes on to describe the beauty of wild nature. When we see the great beauty of nature (such as the Grand Canyon, The Alps, salt caves, coral reefs etc) we are awestruck at the beauty of this natural yet wild substance. I feel that this is how Bowles has described the vision of the woman to Atlajala. It's funny because, as I said in my previous blog post about A Circular Valley, I feel that women are described as a sinful temptress in the Garden of Eden. As a female, I obviously am exhausted with this description of our gender but the story A Circular Valley left an imprint in my mind because of Bowles descriptive language. I felt what the friar felt, I saw the night sky the friar saw, I felt the need of guidance from a higher being as he needed at that time, I felt the wild nature in this setting, I heard the waterfall, I felt the beauty and bewilderment the Atlajala felt once it entered woman.

This collection is not the first single author collection I have read, however, I really can not remember the others I have read. I believe my journey with literature started around fifth grade when I started reading Poe's collections,these are the earliest single author collections I can remember. I would not recommend reading Poe's collections in ENG 220 because I feel they are a bit easy/young for a college level Creative Writing course.