The Sheltering Sky: A Dark Postwar Classic of Alienation and Existential Terror in North Africa

Had to listen to this after reading the short story "A Distant Episode" by Paul Bowles. The story blew me away, as did the novel. Foolish Americans get into trouble in the middle east--a made up country, made up cities, but the author knows his territory. For those who like dark and fatalistic fiction. Edward Said said that Paul Bowles was the epitome of Orientalism, because his Arabs, esp. the nomadic ones, are so dangerous. They live by totally different customs and values. The westerners are so clueless and sure of themselves they walk right into dangerous and even fatal situations. Narrator was excellent. Stylistically brilliant-had me hanging on every word. I rarely write reviews of audio books but this one really affected me.

In February 2018, the book discussion group at the LGBT Center in NYC had a good group to discuss "The Sheltering Sky" by Paul Bowles. This was a very interesting discussion. A few readers didn't care for the book, a number of readers didn't like it at first but then loved it - something clicked and it became a terrific novel, and some of it just liked it from the beginning. The most common complaints were about the style, which Bowles is famous for in "The Sheltering Sky," which some found flat and off-putting. This is a huge, meandering novel that takes a while to figure out what's going on, and then the discovery is that not much happens or, actually, a lot happens but it's largely indirect and unexplained actions that cure to a devastating double ending. "The Sheltering Sky" revolves around three central characters. Port is the rich traveler (never a tourist) who heads deeper and deeper into Africa, but so unplanned and apathetic about his travels that he never gets his shots that are essential to survival in the savage environment. Kit is Port's wife who does whatever she needs to do at the moment and survives wherever she lands. She apparently goes completely crazy at the end of the novel, but she's always a little unstable. Tunner is their handsome friend who tags along, who's in love with the (mostly) unavailable Kit. Minor characters include the creepy and thieving Eric Lyle, who is tortured by his horrible and abusive xenophobic mother (what the hell is she…

The movie led me to the book, which I'd never heard mentioned. In the preface of the edition I bought here, the Author seems to have something against the movie, but as far as I can tell, it follows the book quite nicely, whether or not the book actually went to Morocco (it didn't). The first quarter of the book was a devil to get through as the primary characters, three Americans and two Brits, all white, are fairly unpleasant to say the least. It is very reminiscent of the post WWI books by Hemingway and Fitzgerald, where the characters are Oh-so sophisticated that the world and everything about it bores them, and everyone they meet is below them. And they have the luxury to travel without end, and no job. So whack me with a dose of that, I'll write about it too. The English couple turns out to be a bit perverse, and larcenous, and the Americans never seem to care about anything, or anyone, including each other. The blurb on the back says the book illustrates the way in which "Americans' incomprehension of alien cultures leads to the ultimate destruction of those culutures", which I can understand on a national/foreign policy level (and especially if you take into account how European colonizing of the same region had an even more destabilizing effect) but the North African Arabs described here don't seem the least bit disturbed by the self absorbed and self destructive Americans that sweep through their midst, and eventually find themselves at rope's end. After the…

This is a terrific book by a writer who is not nearly as celebrated as he should be--and I mean Nobel Prize worthy. It's not true that a book grips you--when it's as good as "The Sheltering Sky," it's you that grips the book. That's what I literally found myself doing for big batches of pages at a time; the tension that Bowles creates is that intense. You take the story personally; like you're reading a letter about people you know. If you haven't read this book, read it. If you've seen a movie based upon it, forget you ever saw it and read the book. Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to ramble on a bit. You can stop reading here if you haven't got the time; I'm not really going to say anything more important than I've already said. For instance. In the brief (2-page) preface of the edition of "The Sheltering Sky" that I read, Paul Bowles gives away what is the novel's most shocking turn--why, I can't imagine. Did he think everyone had seen the movie already (one with Debra Winger, apparently; thank God I missed it)? Did he think the novel was already so well-known that it was like revealing that the Greeks came out on top in "the Iliad" or that Ivan Illych dies in "the Death of Ivan Ilych"? Or was it just that he was 87 or so at the time and, like many 87 year-old people, figured he earned the right to do whatever the heck he felt like regardless of propriety? Well, whatever made him do it, I wish he hadn't--it was like watching a blonde in a shower scene in a Friday the…

Three American travelers, wealthy beyond description, drift into the Saharan desert, suffering constant discomfort, loneliness, illness. Their station as travelers is key: They are not the foul-brained tourist gawkers they miserably judge, gathering immediate snapshots to largely leave behind, but Travelers with a T, ingrained in the cultures they move between, accepting the differences or rejecting them: They at least pretend to understand them. Travelers Kit, Port and Tunner live this philosophical post-war outlook from bedrooms and buses, boxcars and hashish-hazed cafes, the culture on the outskirts only there to suffer the Americans' wealthy dissatisfaction. Rejecting, then rejecting, they move further inland, further into a bored American's Heart of Darkness, attitude and identity similarly removing themselves from the malaise'd bodies with every mile, every dune crossed into the suppression of that finalizing sheltering sky. An issue taken--these American Travelers are so flatly self-centered and unlikeable. Never are we meant to like them, or the many characters--namely the Lyles (byech!), so far absorbed by the Sahara they no longer witness their identities past and current as viable--interacting with them, there to receive readers' smiles, but the juxtaposition of bloated and bloating selfishness and ignorance by these enlightened Travelers is too overwhelming it inches miles past the point of believability; the result dissonantly ahead of its time--the marriage…