The Spider's House

The characters of the novel—a cynical writer Stenhame, an American tourist Lee, and a young potter’s apprentice Amar—find themselves at the center of a political hurricane: the Moroccan uprising against French colonizers in the ancient city of Fez. Soon, nothing will remain of their measured life. Recognized as one of the most important achievements of American prose of the 20th century, Paul Bowles’s novel (1910–1999) is especially relevant today because it shows the origins of the Islamic extremism that fascinated the whole world.

The novel is called “The House of the Spider”—or of the spiderwoman—because the epigraph is taken from the Qur’an, and the Qur’an is indeed about a spiderwoman. In 1981 Bowles writes a foreword for a new edition (the novel was written in 1954–55), and he says that he began writing it simply from a desire to somehow tell about Fez. It’s such a medieval town near Tangier, also in Morocco, and it also belonged to France and was part of that interzone. And Bowles started writing—and at some point, the war for independence began. He understood that he could no longer continue this novel the way he’d imagined it. He tried not to take the position of one side, but he still realized that all of this pushed in that direction. And in a way, the novel really turned out to be political. It’s a novel about this complex situation: on one side—struggle for independence; on the other—nationalists and fundamentalists who come to power, and in some sense are even more European in their aspirations, mobilization, than the French colonial government that simply tried, based on its own interests, to freeze this medieval world. And Bowles describes this exceptionally well—the confusion, bewilderment, and a whole tangle of insoluble contradictions that we see today in different parts of the world—this is also the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, endless wars in the Middle East, terrorism, and our Chechen problem. In some pragmatic sense, Bowles is certainly an incredibly useful author—without even counting his aesthetic and literary merits, which, in general, make him one of the main American writers of the 20th century.” Alexander Skidan