Midnight Mass by Paul Bowles, 162 pages
Midnight Mass is a collection of a dozen short stories, most of them set in the author's adopted Morocco, mostly involving interactions between the local Arabs and the European and American immigrants, which the locals mostly get the best of.
Bowles' Arabs are neither noble savages nor benighted barbarians, but people, characters rather than plot devices, situated in rather than determined by their circumstances. His Europeans are rather bloodless by contrast, uncentered, disoriented, and complacent. His stories rarely surprise, instead, they progress with a kind of elegant inevitability.
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