Overview
Midnight Mass is a collection of 12 works of short fiction by Paul Bowles, published in 1981 by Black Sparrow Press. The volume is the fifth collection of Bowles's work, much of which is re-published material.
Stories
* "Midnight Mass" * "The Little House" * "The Dismissal" * "Here to Learn" * "Madame and Ahmed" * "Kitty" * "The Husband" * "At the Krungthep Plaza" * "The Empty Amulet" * "Bouayad and the Money" * "Rumor and a Ladder" * "The Eye" * "In the Red Room"
Critical assessment
Biographer Allen Hibbard reports that Midnight Mass offers "many splendid stories, demonstrating the author's versatility and mastery of the genre...his characteristic sense of sureness and economy is as sharp as ever." Literary critic Francine Prose, commenting on"The Eye", a detective-like tale from the volume, writes: Prose argues that the "complex and relatively genial" story "Here to Learn" provides a corrective to a literary article of faith: Author and literary editor John Updike selected "In the Red Room" for inclusion in The Best American Stories, 1984
Theme
The themes in the works from Midnight Mass reflect the sedentary life that Bowles, then in his sixties, adopted as a resident of Tangiers and his preoccupation with his domestic staff and real estate holdings. Allen Hibbard writes: Hibbard adds that "the stories begin with a presentation of a house, which becomes a fragile haven for human life or a contested site for opposing values...two worldviews compete with each other under one roof..." The stories in the volume, frequently told in the first-person point-of-view, convey "post-colonial anxieties" and challenge "the authenticity of divine revelation."
Sources
*Hibbard, Allen. 1993. Paul Bowles: A Study of the Short Fiction. Twayne Publishers. New York. *Hamdaoui, Zoubida. 2013. Themes and Story-Telling Strategies in Paul Bowles's North African Fiction. Tesis Doctoral. University of Granada, Spain. https://digibug.ugr.es/bitstream/handle/10481/29918/21922500.pdf?sequence=1 Retrieved 19 August 2022. *Prose, Francine. 2002. The Coldest Eye: acting badly among the Arabs. Harper's Magazine. March, 2002. https://harpers.org/archive/2002/03/the-coldest-eye/ Retrieved 10 July 2022