In one of his poems, D. H. Lawrence speaks of a creature whose origin predates not only man, but God—a creature born "before God was love"—and it is precisely this sense of a natural world predating and excluding consciousness that Paul Bowles dramatizes so powerfully in [his "Collected Stories"]. It is no accident that the doomed professor (of linguistics) in the story "A Distant Episode" loses his tongue before he loses his mind and his humanity—a captive of an outlaw tribe in the Sahara; nor is it by mere chance that an American girl, visiting her mother and her mother's lesbian companion in Colombia (in "The Echo") succumbs to an irrational violence more alarming than any she has ever witnessed. Attacking her mother's lover, she "uttered the greatest scream of her life"—pure sound, bestial and liberating.

Too much has been made, perhaps, of the...