When you read Paul Bowles’s Midnight Mass, one recurring emotion keeps surfacing: in this world, almost everyone is a stranger. Bowles writes about Tangier and its surroundings in such a way that the dividing line does not run between “European” and “Muslim,” but between the individual and a space that fully accepts no one. In the stories about expatriates, you feel their confused attempts to gain a foothold in a country that does not belong to them. In the stories about Muslim families, there is the same sense of alienation, only from within: the characters lose their bearings inside their own homes, customs, and fears, as if reality itself were constantly slipping out from under their feet.

Parables like “The Hyena” add yet another layer: here it is the reader who becomes the outsider, because the rules of narration are different, non-Western, and Bowles makes no effort to explain them.

Taken together, these stories produce a strange sensation: no one in them is the master of the territory. People, traditions, houses, even animals—all seem to exist on a kind of borderland, where order exists, but not for you. And it is precisely this fundamental sense of non-belonging that gives the collection its coherence: Bowles depicts a world in which everyone navigates blindly, and this is the norm.