Yesterday's Perfume: An Intimate Memoir of Paul Bowles Book

The formidable charm of Paul Bowles radiates from every page of this unconventional memoir, which recalls Cherie Nutting's friendship with the expatriate American writer-composer during the last 13 years of his life. Nutting layers together text (her narrative, his journal extracts and unpublished writings) and photographs (of Bowles, his friends, and various significant objects) in a collage-like format. This impressionistic approach is highly appropriate to Bowles (1910-99), whose first published work appeared in a surrealist magazine, and who remained an avant-garde innovator in music and literature for half a century. Although 40 years his junior, Nutting has similar interests: she fell in love at age 10 with Morocco, his adopted homeland; and, when she read his best-known novel, The Sheltering Sky, in the 1970s, "the book meant everything" to her. Inspired by recurring dreams, she wrote to Bowles in 1985 and explained that "it was in my destiny that we should meet"; he responded with an invitation to visit him in Tangier. Her photos show a radiantly handsome old man, while her reminiscences of kif smoking, rambles through the Moroccan landscape, and pronouncements like "the illicit bouquet that smelled of yesterday's perfume" create a dreamy atmosphere. Readers who are disinclined to this sort of stargazing will find comic relief in a running subplot that involves the house that's being built for Nutting by Bowles's friend Mohammed Mrabet, who extracts substantial sums of money from both of them, gets angry whenever his plans are questioned, and takes a long time to complete the structure. Readers who are attuned to the special sensibility that's expressed in Bowles's life and work will find it evocatively captured here. --Wendy SmithRead More