The Sheltering Sky

by Paul Bowles

The Sheltering Sky

by
Paul Bowles

book data

3,021 ratings, 3.96 average rating, 384 reviews (more data...)

rating	frequency	%
5		35%
4		35%
3		19%
2		5%
1		2%

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published

April 15th 2008 by Peter Owen Ltd (first published 1949)

details

Hardcover

setting

Morocco

isbn

0720613159 (isbn13: 9780720613155)

description

American novelist and short-story writer, poet, translator, classical music composer, and filmscorer Paul Bowles has lived as an expatriate for more t…more

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Mar 30, 2008

Lara rated it:

(review of isbn 0141023422)

bookshelves: desert, heart-breaking, life-changing

Read in January, 1995

"Each man's destiny is personal only inso as it may resemble what is already in his memory."

This quote is from Eduardo Mallea, and it begins The Sheltering Sky with that strange act of framing that so many authors employ, using the words of others to summarize or introduce the feelings that they are about to try to invoke in their readers. Above this quote is another phrase: "Tea in the Sahara," a chapter title, now-familiar but difficult to place. This was take...more "Each man's destiny is personal only inso as it may resemble what is already in his memory."

This quote is from Eduardo Mallea, and it begins The Sheltering Sky with that strange act of framing that so many authors employ, using the words of others to summarize or introduce the feelings that they are about to try to invoke in their readers. Above this quote is another phrase: "Tea in the Sahara," a chapter title, now-familiar but difficult to place. This was taken by none other than the band The Police, to introduce their own work, a song of the same name that recreates a story from The Sheltering Sky. It's an interesting little web - and indicative, I think, of the kind of impact that this book seems to have on people, or at least on those who love it.

I did strange things because of this book. I bought leather-bound antique tomes written by T.E. Lawrence, and read them to a friend while wrapped in blankets and candlelight, hiding from a snowstorm, which we both pretended was sand and not ice. I became obsessed with the notions of breath and spirit that are espoused by the Touareg people of the Sahara desert. I planned films. I devoured the works of Isabelle Eberhardt, an early pioneer of female-gender-bending and exotic adventure. And finally, I bought a one-way ticket to Morocco to see Mr. Bowles, himself.

What happened after that is a long story, and a large part of my psychic history. Bowles died three days before I arrived, although Fate did land me at his wake, and I became friends with many of his, most notably the famous Moroccan novelist, Mohammed Choukri. I also ended up living in North Africa for about two years, and spending a good deal of time in the desert, undergoing indeed what Bowles translates as the baptism of solitude.

This is a long-winded way of saying that there is something special in this book, something that has the ability to get into you and never let you go. It makes you do things, it shakes you up and reminds you of emotions and fears that you had forgotten to give names to. And as the Mallea quote suggests, this book does nothing to you that you haven't already in some way done to yourself, or brings out nothing that wasn't already there, some other, wilder experience, some other collision with the real, and the you that you have forgotten or think you have lost.

For those who have watched or loved the film adaptation, I cannot speak to it as I've never been able to bring myself to see it. I am not a big fan of Bertolucci's work, although he does do some interesting things with silence. Bowles' comment on the film was something to the effect of, "How can you make a movie when all the action takes place inside people's heads?"(less)

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2 comments

Jan 26, 2008

Isaiah rated it:

(review of isbn 0679729798)

bookshelves: favorites

In my younger days, I sensed that this was a rudely under-appreciated book that, merely acclaimed, deserved inclusion within the canon of the Gods themselves (Hemingway, Melville, Joyce, McCarthy). More recently, I have realized that not the book qua narrative, but its singular intimacy with my person colored the profoundness of my love-affair with this novel. As a result, my review must be peculiarly subjective for someone so accustomed to the pretense of objectivity.

Whether its eff...more In my younger days, I sensed that this was a rudely under-appreciated book that, merely acclaimed, deserved inclusion within the canon of the Gods themselves (Hemingway, Melville, Joyce, McCarthy). More recently, I have realized that not the book qua narrative, but its singular intimacy with my person colored the profoundness of my love-affair with this novel. As a result, my review must be peculiarly subjective for someone so accustomed to the pretense of objectivity.

Whether its effect on my life resulted from the epoch in which I read it (adolescence) or a nascent affinity I can not know. Either way, the very themes over which Bowles obsesses are the same which motivate the several pathologies of myself as man and human being.

It's true that The Sheltering Sky is primarily a love story, yet one in which the desert itself -- its hajji, its pathogens, its sterile expanse -- serves as antagonist as much as the tension of refractory lovers. Bowles' position is thus one of the experientialist: that meaning derives from the experience, and without experience the life stands bereft of meaning.

But there is much more to be said. For though Port and Kit's love is brought into this world as a burden, the promise is that the very foreignness of the land is what will bring it to resolution. This is not the myth of the expatriate (that the foreign place will cure all domestic malaise) but a more general principle: that the longer one can not find that which one seeks within the familiar, the more likely it lies in some place strange and horrible.

And indeed they do find resolution, but not the one they knew themselves to be searching for. Instead, a resolution which leaves the reader as much as Bowles' protagonists haunted by the heaviness of love and chaos of the exotic.

Perhaps what drew me most into this world and its ethos is Bowles' style itself, which matches with unnerving certainty the psychology of his characters to their external circumstance. In this way, a breathtaking comprehensiveness is stitched by prose at once robust and feminine, Möbius in its intention, Attic in its certainty.

This correspondence between psychology and circumstance provides a veritable well of affect, both for the characters and the reader. As a consequence, The Sheltering Sky has not only inspired the sole piece of complete writing I ever authored, but assisted in authoring the much more sincere trajectory of my own experience.

Recommended. (less)

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Apr 01, 2008

Chip rated it:

(review of isbn 0141023422)

Read in May, 1998

Oh man oh man. Someday I will have to revisit this, as I seem to mention it to anyone or anything who is willing to listen. Has probably become my favorite book of all time: simultaneously capturing the utter loneliness of existence, and the strange beauty of the desert/and/or the foreign. Makes me want to travel, makes me want to stay home and hide under the covers...it's that good.

I've read almost all of Bowles' other stuff, and some of it comes close to this (especially Let it Co...more

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Jun 14, 2007

Jessica rated it:

(review of isbn 0880015829)

Read in June, 2007

recommends it for: Old Men

I rarely don't finish a book. This is a personal tendency (obsessiveness) which cemented itself during forays into such tomes as Les Miserables (5th grade) and Tess of the D'Urbervilles (10th grade) in which the endeavor seemed like it would be fruitless, and then, ahoy! A beautiful gem on the sparkling sea surfaces, a hundred or so pages in, and I was rewarded for my patience...
So it pains me to report that not even the chance of such a obscured jewel could keep me interested in A Shelte...more

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Jan 25, 2010

Whitaker rated it:

(review of isbn 0141187778)

bookshelves: modern-canon

Read in January, 2010

Like a sweet-talking charmer, Bowles seduced me with his crystalline prose. His sentences whispered in my ear and nibbled my nape, erasing thought from my haze-addled brain.

Later, many days later, I came to with a throbbing headache and a sour taste in my mouth. The crystal turned out to be crystal meth and it had severely eroded my judgement. What I had taken to be beautiful and enticing was just a jaded street hustler peddling the same old weary goods that had been around the bl...more Like a sweet-talking charmer, Bowles seduced me with his crystalline prose. His sentences whispered in my ear and nibbled my nape, erasing thought from my haze-addled brain.

Later, many days later, I came to with a throbbing headache and a sour taste in my mouth. The crystal turned out to be crystal meth and it had severely eroded my judgement. What I had taken to be beautiful and enticing was just a jaded street hustler peddling the same old weary goods that had been around the block just too many times: naive privileged Westerners seek the purity of the savage wilderness, only to be destroyed by the horror, the horror of the eternal Om.

Yes, I get it. The bleak landscape of the Saharan desert substitutes here for the bleak desert of the American suburban landscape (see, for example, American Beauty). Protective veneers are stripped away to reveal the isolation and alienation at the heart of Kit, Port and their relationship. I can even get why people might love it.

But what gets me is the notion that in this Bowles was somehow being hard-nosed, rejecting romanticism. It may perhaps be a rejection of a particular romantic notion that salvation via the Essential and the Real are to be found outside civilization (see, for example, Kerouac). But this view of the Other as that blind unfeeling un-West that shreds the corrupt deracinated white man is just disguised romanticism, a precious existentialist reading of civilization by someone who can afford to pooh-pooh it, who is not going to have to dodge murdering soldiers to get water or till a parched field to feed his family.

Make no mistake, I'm no apologist for the ills of rampant capitalist consumerism nor some fool lover of the anomie that is corporate life. But life is what it is. If you're going to go to Africa and not get your shots, you're a damn fool. And you'd be just as much a fool if you'd tried scaling the north-face of the Matterhorn in the nude, notwithstanding it's proximity to consumerist, luxury-stuffed St Moritz.

(Three stars: -2 stars for story, +5 for writing.)
(less)

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17 comments

May 17, 2008

Amy rated it:

(review of isbn 0880015829)

Read in May, 2008

In this novel a husband and wife and a sorta friend of theirs are travelling around North Africa. It's the 1940s, so one has to contextualize the sometimes awkward/semi-racist descriptions of the "natives." Or if you aren't interested in giving the characters any leeway, that's okay too, but the book works very well as a portrayal of arrogant, neurotic Americans in a hostile, alien world.

A lot of shit goes down. At first you might think that you are just witnessing the det...more

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Jul 18, 2008

Sara rated it:

(review of isbn 0141023422)

Read in July, 2008

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Nov 08, 2007

Garrett rated it:

(review of isbn 0141023422)

Read in January, 2002

recommends it for: people interested in any sort of travel writing

This one reminds me much of both Greene and Maugham. The travelers in the Sheltering Sky are experienced, for sure, dedicated to really getting to know a place, hell-bent (literally) on getting the full experience, of living instead of touring. The swagger and confidence they have, the invincibility they feel, their sense of entitlement ultimately destroys them all in one way or another.
Bowles does an amazing job of describing the landscape (sub-Saharan Africa after WWII), the sickness of ...more

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Jul 13, 2007

David rated it:

(review of isbn 0880015829)

i was all WOW! or maybe i was all WOWZY WOW WOW after i finished it. this quote will kill you. ""Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, five times more, pe...more

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Aug 14, 2008

Samia rated it:

(review of isbn 0141023422)

bookshelves: drifters

Read in August, 2008

Paul Bowles’ somewhat penetrating portrayal of an emotionally disconnected couple traveling south through the Sahara in an effort to escape all that’s wrong with post-WWII Europe devolves into the kind of drivel I would expect from a colonial teenager’s sexual fantasies by the novel's last 100 or so pages.

“The Sheltering Sky” certainly brought a lot of questions to mind. Like: if I were not a woman would I have a different idea of what constitutes realism and what constitu...more

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Jul 02, 2008

Chaz rated it:

(review of isbn 006083482X)

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

Paul Bowles creates a terrifying and realistic view of humanity in this drama. The premise of the story is that three characters, Port, Kit and Tunner set out for the venture in the Sahara. They’re thirsting for adventure, and a freedom that they cannot find present in their everyday lives in New York City. They find it.
Twists, roundabouts and forks galore-this isn’t a traditional drama where hope is rekindled at the end or the greater good of humanity wins. It’s a sad story, but a g...more

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May 18, 2008

Sara-Maria rated it:

(review of isbn 006083482X)

Read in May, 2008

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

update: very helpful article for sorting out my reactions to this book-Edwards, Brian T. "Sheltering Screens: Paul Bowles and Foreign Relations" American Literary History - Volume 17, Number 2, Summer 2005, pp. 307-33. Can be found in Project Muse database.

this book is highly praised, and I entered into the reading enthusiastically. The enthusiasm quickly tapered off into disinterest, wavering sometimes into disgust, sometimes into intrigue, but I feel like in my dismissi...more update: very helpful article for sorting out my reactions to this book-Edwards, Brian T. "Sheltering Screens: Paul Bowles and Foreign Relations" American Literary History - Volume 17, Number 2, Summer 2005, pp. 307-33. Can be found in Project Muse database.

this book is highly praised, and I entered into the reading enthusiastically. The enthusiasm quickly tapered off into disinterest, wavering sometimes into disgust, sometimes into intrigue, but I feel like in my dismissiveness I missed a lot. Now I find myself unable to shake the story and even shelled out a few bucks to rent the Bertolucci film.

The disgust first: North Africa figures in mainly as a hazy but alluring backdrop for the existential crisis of Port and Kit--the jaded married couple, self-proclaimed 'travelers' rather than 'tourists', lured to unknown places for unknown reasons--and most readers I suspect, will come away with an exoticized picture, if any picture at all, of their location. I have yet to read critical commentary on the novel, but I'm guessing, especially with Said at one's disposal, that this book has gotten some shit, rightly so perhaps, for its orientalism. Although Port and Kit are set apart (as more critical, and less…American) from their companion Tunner and other Westerners they met on the trip, such as the Lyles, they and the author, insofar as there is a distinction, reproduce time and time again the blind arrogance of power and privilege. That being said, there is, if you can make it to the third section, a substantive meditation on cultural encounters, meaning, disintegration, time and the like to be found here, evoked by the vastness of the desert and sky in its glory and its horror--although I have the feeling that the depth of this can and has often been missed (perhaps even by Bowles himself. To the extent that I want to be generous to Bowles, the blatant eurocentrism in its blatantess (the Arabic of locals, mainly hotel workers, wasn’t translated, for example--such characters presumably having nothing to add in way of narrative propulsion outside of room key wielding and a little native color) was a deliberate technique, structured so as to reveal the readers' complicity too with such a gaze, for it is how they (and we through their interactions) see and don't see the place and themselves (and ourselves) that leads to their (and our) ruin. Port and Kit's self-absorption and self-alienation--and placed as protagonists we readers too are drawn to be absorbed and alienated by them, with them, in their little obsessions and hang-ups--is at the lonely exclusion of much else, and their unwieldy attempts to the contrary are futile at best, positively disastrous at worst, marred as they must be by travel's painful half-acknowledged impossibilities. Such centering, the strategy of spotlighting the powerful once again, I have come to think is an absolutely crucial project (if only perhaps to give me purpose) but, and maybe I am just wanting Bowles to do my work for me, the exposition of the encounter was so…one-sided, even if deliberately, so as to clothe the political brunt behind rather tepid philosophizing and decontexualized romance, the dullness of which being precisely what fiction, in its amenability to creative encounters, can led us away from. In compiling a comparative sketch of first/third-world relations, which I can’t help but want to do, this had nothing of the suggestive tone and aching search of works such as Heart of Darkness or the Pickup that so capture my attention.(less)

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Oct 29, 2008

Will rated it:

(review of isbn 0141023422)

Read in January, 2005

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Oct 10, 2007

Amanda rated it:

(review of isbn 0141023422)

decadently written and beautifully tragic...
"Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you w...more

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Feb 28, 2010

Alli Rense rated it:

(review of isbn 006083482X)

Read in February, 2010

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Nov 27, 2009

Ben Mullins rated it:

(review of isbn 006083482X)

bookshelves: fiction-lit, mod-lib-100-best-20th-cen, philosophy

Read in November, 2009

The Sheltering Sky is a beautifully written story about the nature of existence. Is it to live life to its fullest, living in the moment rich with experiences? Is it to be still and embrace the oneness/oblivion of the universe, and to live in that moment? Port and Kit travel to North Africa, wresting, poorly, with these questions, though not consciously. Port yearns for oblivion, but seeks it through experiences. Kit years to live in the moment, but fear keeps her bottled up in herself.
...more

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Oct 31, 2009

Chip rated it:

(review of isbn 0679729798)

Read in August, 2002

It was a strange read, not what I would call "the most important book of the century published since the war..." as was touted. It had moments of great clarity, however. I was never able to figure out the motive for Port's headlong dash into dissolution... he seemed intent on blasting himself into oblivion and succeeded handsomely. Kit seemed to be his wife but never was. Her only intimate encounter, at least early on, was with Tunner, their traveling companion. There was also Eri...more

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Sep 16, 2009

Jason rated it:

(review of isbn 0141023422)

bookshelves: read-2009

Read in September, 2009

What beings easily, a trio of Americans on the coast of North Africa discussing dreams. Quickly, however, the tone changes. It is about a husband and a wife trying to reconnect in some way, it is a triangle between that couple and their friend, it is a triangle between the couple and the desert, it is about the American's and the English and the French in African countries.

What begins so simply becomes confusing and illuminating. Touching on fidelity (and it's more exciting modifier...more

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Mar 03, 2010

Katy rated it:

(review of isbn 0880015829)

bookshelves: fiction, travel

Read in March, 2010

This is a haunting book. Although I found the characters unsympathetic and the plot, weak; the setting and the writing are unforgettable. It is really a psychological novel about two people, Port and Kit, who have come to a country in North Africa to travel and perhaps rekindle their marriage. They are accompanied by a third person, Tunner, an old friend. The story is propelled by the changing relationships of the three, and especially by Port's death from Typhoid and the consequent mental and e...more

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Jan 01, 2010

Sunflower rated it:

(review of isbn 0060199164)

bookshelves: africa, fiction-read-2010, library

Read in January, 2010

Three Americans who think of themselves as travellers, not tourists, are adrift in North Africa after the second World War. What happens to them is a miserable cry of despair, as their emotional dislocation and incomprehension of their surroundings gradually destroys them. Most of the book is about their inner landscapes, though the Sahara and North Africa and its people feature prominently. Everyone is flawed, more so as time goes on and the main characters move further and further from civilis...more

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