Let it come down - BookWyrm

No cover — Paul Bowles: Let it come down (1984, Owen)

318 pages

English language

Published 1984 by Owen.

ISBN:: 978-0-7206-0614-0

(1 review)

Nelson Dyar leaves his tame bank job in New York to work in a friend's travel agency in Tangier, only to learn that the agency is a front for illegal currency exchange.

First published in 1952, Paul Bowles' novel Let It Come Down (the citation from Shakespeare's Macbeth) celebrates an era within the city of Tangier which, as Bowles notes in his Preface "Thirty Years Later", "has long ago ceased to exist. ... Like a photograph, the tale is a document relating to a specific place at a given moment in time, illuminated by the light of that particular moment". The final section of the novel, "Another Kind of Silence", was famously written in Xauen in the Rif mountains while under the influence of kif.

3 editions

Ojārs Kapteinis reviewed Let it come down by Paul Bowles

Grifting in the Shadows

4 stars

As changes with the second Trump presidency are coming, I wanted to read a book about a place that no longer exists (Tangier International Zone), as it feels like the same might happen with the American empire. It was a place where people grifted each other, played shadowy games, and trusted nobody because they knew that those around them were just like them — frauds. So, it’s no surprise that the protagonist went mad while committing acts of grifting, as he was constantly running schemes in his head about how others might grift him.

The ironic part is that the protagonist mistook his madness for clear and rational thinking. I think there are parallels with present-day Americans because those grifters who have just gained power are also in the same mindset.