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The Sheltering Sky

Paul Bowles,

Νίκος Α. Μάντης (Translator)

3.91 · Rating details · 22,649 ratings · 1,582 reviews

Ύστερα από δέκα χρόνια γάμου, ο Πορτ και η Κιτ Μόρσμπερι, ένα σοφιστικέ ζευγάρι Αμερικανών, διαπιστώνουν πως, καθώς έχουν απομακρυνθεί ψυχικά και έχουν αποξενωθεί σεξουαλικά, δυσκολεύονται όλο και περισσότερο να συνεχίσουν να συμβιώνουν. Προσπαθώντας να βγουν από αυτό το αδιέξοδο, ταξιδεύουν στη Βόρεια Αφρική με σκοπό να διασχίσουν την Αλγερία – δεν έχουν καταλήξει στον ακ Ύστερα από δέκα χρόνια γάμου, ο Πορτ και η Κιτ Μόρσμπερι, ένα σοφιστικέ ζευγάρι Αμερικανών, διαπιστώνουν πως, καθώς έχουν απομακρυνθεί ψυχικά και έχουν αποξενωθεί σεξουαλικά, δυσκολεύονται όλο και περισσότερο να συνεχίσουν να συμβιώνουν. Προσπαθώντας να βγουν από αυτό το αδιέξοδο, ταξιδεύουν στη Βόρεια Αφρική με σκοπό να διασχίσουν την Αλγερία – δεν έχουν καταλήξει στον ακριβή προορισμό τους, αλλά είναι αποφασισμένοι να αφήσουν πίσω τους τον σύγχρονο κόσμο. Αυτή η ανέμελή τους απόφαση όμως θα έχει τρομερές συνέπειες και για τους δύο.

Μεταφέρθηκε στον κινηματογράφο από τον Μπερνάρντο Μπερτολούτσι, με πρωταγωνιστές την Ντέμπρα Γουίνκερ και τον Τζον Μάλκοβιτς.

Ήταν ένα απόγευμα του Ιουλίου του 1947. Είχα μόλις ξυπνήσει από μια σιέστα που μου επέβαλλε η ζέστη, γιατί η Φεζ μπορεί να έχει πολύ υψηλές θερμοκρασίες το καλοκαίρι. Θυμάμαι την αποπνικτική ατμόσφαιρα στο κλειστοφοβικό δωμάτιο. «Θα ανοίξω το παράθυρο» σκέφτηκα «και από κάτω θα είναι το λιμάνι του Ουαχράν, και ο αέρας θα είναι φρέσκος και δροσερός». Ήμουν ήδη μέσα στο βιβλίο που ήθελα να γράψω.
Paul Bowles
Από τον πρόλογό του στο βιβλίο

ΕΓΡΑΨΑΝ ΓΙΑ ΤΟ ΒΙΒΛΙΟ
Ένα από τα πιο πρωτότυπα, θα έλεγε κανείς ενορατικά, λογοτεχνικά έργα του 20ού αιώνα.
Tobias Wolff, συγγραφέας

Ένα έργο που στέκεται επάξια στην πρώτη γραμμή της αγγλόφωνης μεταπολεμικής λογοτεχνίας.
New Republic

Ευφυές… Ένα βιβλίο δυνατό και διεισδυτικό, με εντάσεις που συγκλονίζουν.
Evening Standard ...more

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Paperback, Penguin Red Classics, 342 pages

Published June 1st 2007 by Penguin Books (first published 1949)

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3.91 ·

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Aug 14, 2015 Jeffrey Keeten rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: travel, book-to-film

"He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler. The difference is partly one of time, he would explain. Whereas a tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another."

Before meeting Port Moresby, I always thought of myself as a traveler, but after one particular late night discussion accompanied by inebriation, interrupted by ...more

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Sep 25, 2018 Jim Fonseca rated it really liked it

Shelves: american-authors, french-north-africa, psychological-novel

“On the Road” in North Africa, published eight years before Kerouac’s classic. A 30-ish American married couple and a male friend are traveling in the French colonies right after the end of World War II at a time when the US State Department advised people NOT to travel there because of rampant disease and the disintegration of social conditions and of law and order.

The first half of the book focuses on the husband; the second half on the wife. (view spoiler) ...more

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Oct 23, 2017 Michael rated it it was amazing

Hypnotic, searing, terrifying, I first read this when I too was living in North Africa--in Egypt, to be precise--and it utterly shattered me. I recognized something of myself and my fellow expats in the thoughtfully self-centered and naive travelers depicted here, and something of the merciless cruelty of the desert I was never far from. The prose style isn't elaborate, but it isn't stark either, and the best I can describe it is to say that it weaves quite a spell, opening a slight yet horrifyi ...more

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Mar 27, 2016 Steven Godin rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, america

This has destroyed me!, an utterly devastating work of immense power where the frailties of life both physically and emotionally are pushed to the very limits in a hostile, dangerous and unforgiving land.
Having settled in Tangier in the late 40's Paul Bowles uses his knowledge and experiences of French North Africa to startling effect. American couple Kit and Port Moresby have a marriage that is disintegrating and feel a trip abroad could help repair their relationship, so to avoid a ravaged Eur This has destroyed me!, an utterly devastating work of immense power where the frailties of life both physically and emotionally are pushed to the very limits in a hostile, dangerous and unforgiving land.
Having settled in Tangier in the late 40's Paul Bowles uses his knowledge and experiences of French North Africa to startling effect. American couple Kit and Port Moresby have a marriage that is disintegrating and feel a trip abroad could help repair their relationship, so to avoid a ravaged Europe following the second world war decide to travel through Algeria with their friend Tunner in tow, who clearly has some strong feelings for the beautiful Kit, things were never going to work out as hoped. There are Train journeys and bus rides through stunning but harsh landscapes with deserts, valleys, and rugged terrain where the unrelenting heat of the sun is a constant factor during the days, but it's when staying in the small towns where the reel problems start to arise, with general bickering, kit's uncomfortable mood towards their surrounding taking hold and Port disappearing into the night, as couples go it only seems likely they will drift further apart with no signs of happiness on the horizon. Slowly an uneasiness starts to creep in, with figures lurking in the shadow's of dark passageways, strange looks from locals they can never be certain about, with fly's buzzing, dogs barking, small children crying, there is a building paranoia, and Paul Bowles does make everything out in a stark, desolate, but realistic way similar to say Cormac Mcarthy, so if your looking for joy it does not exist here, as there were a few passages of writing in particular quite early on of such bleakness I had to go over them again as just couldn't believe my eyes, so he does not exactly portray a place where one would wish to hang around for too long. While the first half reads like a travel novel this would only go on to set the scene for when events take a turn into something of almost unbearable tensions that has quite frankly left me shattered.

...more

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Sep 05, 2015 Vessey rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 4-stars, romance

SPOILERS

“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, 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, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t ...more

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Mar 30, 2008 Lara Messersmith-Glavin rated it it was amazing

Shelves: desert, life-changing, heart-breaking

"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 "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?" ...more

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Aug 18, 2013 Darwin8u rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 100-mccaffery, 100-modern-library, 2015

“How fragile we are under the sheltering sky. Behind the sheltering sky is a vast dark universe, and we're just so small.”
― Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

description

Paul Bowles masterpiece reminds me of some alternate, trippy, version of Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night, but instead we see the other side of the Mediterranean. Tangier and the deserts of North Africa take the place of the South of France. A different love triangle exposes different forms of loneliness, madness, love, and existential expats ...more

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Aug 21, 2017 Julie rated it it was amazing

The story opens with a young married couple and an attractive male companion, on an adventurous rendezvous in Northern Africa.

Oooooh, how scintillating. . . how very, very scintillating. Starry skies, the soft curves of the sensuous desert in the backdrop. . .

Within just a few pages I had cast the movie. My film version of this story was going to star Ralph Fiennes-as-English Patient, Joseph Fiennes-as-Shakespeare and, well. . . naturally, me. I had already decided that, if one of the Fiennes b ...more

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Apr 15, 2017 Robin rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2017, literary-fiction, american

Sensual Existentialism in the Sahara

4.5 stars

Someone once had said to her that the sky hides the night behind it, shelters the person beneath from the horror that lies above.

Married couple Port and Kit Moresby, in a physically and emotionally distant relationship, are traveling through northern Africa with their friend Tunner. Rejecting America and Europe in post WWII disgust, these "travellers" (not tourists, Port is adamant about the difference) hope to find meaning in the mystery of the Sah ...more

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Dec 02, 2015 Perry rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: mina-favoritböcker

The One Book I Can Truly Say Made Me Feel as if I was Hypnotized*
“How fragile we are under the sheltering sky. Behind [it] is a vast dark universe, and we're just so small.”

I was absolutely hypnotized by Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky, a lush and lyrical novel following a married couple and their male friend (they're "travelers," they say, not "tourists") as they wonder aimlessly through the desolation and harshness of the cities and deserts of North Africa shortly after WW II.

Within the novel ...more

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Jan 25, 2010 Whitaker rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: modern-canon, z_2010-read

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 m 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.)
...more

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Jan 28, 2012 Richard Derus rated it it was ok

Rating: A craven, self-preservationistic 2* of five

BkC8: Tedious twaddle.

When I'm right, I'm right.

The Book Report: Kit and Port Moresby (get the Australia/New Guinea colonial joke, huh? huh? How clever is Paul Bowles, right?) are not gonna make it as a couple. They just aren't. So, in time-honored rich-couple-in-over-relationship fashion, they Travel. They don't take a trip, or a vacation, oh perish forbid, they Travel. North Africa, they think, no one we know will be there so we won't have to ...more

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Sep 23, 2015 Brian rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I think I have a reasonable amount of time separating me from September of last year when I read this book for a second time. My wife and I were on a 10 day trip to Morocco and I suggested that we read The Sheltering Sky in tandem. Bowles tale of existential dread and Western culture collision with the desert and denizens of North Africa was supposed to be a fictional journey to parallel our actual one. It wasn’t.

Bowles’ now relatively famous distinction between a traveler and a tourist is an ar I think I have a reasonable amount of time separating me from September of last year when I read this book for a second time. My wife and I were on a 10 day trip to Morocco and I suggested that we read The Sheltering Sky in tandem. Bowles tale of existential dread and Western culture collision with the desert and denizens of North Africa was supposed to be a fictional journey to parallel our actual one. It wasn’t.

Bowles’ now relatively famous distinction between a traveler and a tourist is an artifice. It is part of the genius of this novel in that the Reader takes Bowles position on traveler/tourist and then watches to see how the three American characters behave according to Bowles’ rules, all the while reflecting on how differently I would behave. Another important difference between tourist and traveler is that the former accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with the others, and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking. How quaint a notion, offered so early in the novel. Read to see how American civilization frays at the edges beneath that sheltering sky; watch what happens when the so called “traveler” rejects elements not to his liking.

We finished reading the novel and discussed it over dinner. The next morning we would leave for three days in the Atlas mountains with the Berbers. Our conversation weaved between our thoughts on Kit, Moresby and Tunner and our excitement of the impending unknown spending time with another culture, completely off the grid and out of our comfort zone. Life held a different plan for us, however, and the next morning we were frantically trying to find a western hospital with a medical emergency that was no joke. Within minutes our Western Bubble was pierced – we were no longer in the beautiful hotel with room service and candlelight dinners, we were in a taxi with a driver that spoke no English rushing to a Marrakesh hospital in a place no tourist nor traveler would ever choose to be. This day also happened to be the Eid al-Fitr celebration, so the hospital had minimum staff and a waiting room filled to capacity. Nobody spoke English, my monoglotism shaming me yet again. My wife needed immediate medical attention, French and Arabic were only spoken at the intake desk, and all these Marrakeshians also trying to get admittance are looking at me like I’m from another planet. I was losing my patience, I was frightened, I realized that in that moment there was nothing that any part of my Western civilization could offer me to help. I was experiencing a brutal intersection with Bowles’ narrative; I was the clueless American in North Africa, the fifty year span between Bowles’ characters and me might as well have been the same day experience. For I had done as Kit did attempting to build a pathetic little fortress of Western culture in the middle of the wilderness.

Moresby asks himself if any American can truthfully accept a definition of life which makes it synonymous with suffering. I don’t know whether to call myself a traveler or a tourist, but as I continue to visit other places on the planet and meet people from other cultures I attempt to brook my life filters to learn from them. I don’t know suffering, not the way that most people that have lived – are living – have. The Sheltering Sky is a fine introduction to the beginning of that conversation, especially for Americans that travel.

Kit mentions in Book Three that someone once told her that the sky hides the night behind it, that it shelters the person beneath from the horror that lies above.

What is going to shelter us from everything beneath the sky? ...more

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Jun 26, 2011 S. rated it it was ok

Shelves: read-in-2011

This is an ambitious novel about alienation, isolation and despair. The story revolves around the character of Port Moresby, who, in disillusioned response to WWII, rejects America and Europe, leaving NY for Africa with his wife Kit as well as an acquaintance named Tunner, whom they both dislike.

Port feels Africa is less marred by war, and aims to spend a long period of time there. It’s not that he would fit in, he just wants to escape, or disappear. He may hope to flee his emptiness, but unfort This is an ambitious novel about alienation, isolation and despair. The story revolves around the character of Port Moresby, who, in disillusioned response to WWII, rejects America and Europe, leaving NY for Africa with his wife Kit as well as an acquaintance named Tunner, whom they both dislike.

Port feels Africa is less marred by war, and aims to spend a long period of time there. It’s not that he would fit in, he just wants to escape, or disappear. He may hope to flee his emptiness, but unfortunately it’s a very clingy travelling companion. While his grudge against his culture propels him abroad, removing whatever external irritations Port might find in New York, the desert confronts him with his own inner emptiness. Port seems to relish wallowing there, while dragging his wife along. She isn’t one to protest – despite her unhappy state Kit seems devoted to Port, she bends to him, she bites her tongue and she packs her bags and comes.

Other than facing the landscape’s reflection of one’s inner desolation, you can’t help but wonder what appeal Africa holds. Port, Kit and Tunner find mostly squalor – ferocious flies, pink hairless dogs, wailing babies covered in sores, garbage in hotels, and cafés that smell of urine. But Port doesn’t care about sight-seeing or how many stars a hotel has: he’s a “traveller,” not a “tourist.” And he is the engine for the whole unfortunate story, even though he does manage to take his leave midway through the book.

At the end of Book 1, Port visits a teahouse, where he gets the hots for a blind prostitute/dancer. Her expressionless face while dancing says to him, “A dance is being done. I do not dance because I am not here. But it is my dance.” That peace is very much what Port seems to want. He is also attracted to this particular dancer because her blindness means she cannot see him. She erases him.

It all goes downhill from there.

In general, I thought the writing of The Sheltering Sky was good and the themes were interesting and important and are generally themes I like. I would have taken a philosophical point of view if the offensive handling of Kit as a woman hadn’t pushed my feminist button so hard it still hasn't popped back out.

First off, I realize the book was written in that late 1940s, but the use of the word “girl” to describe Kit grated on me immediately. I could have chalked it up to the times and shrugged it off. Even her attachment to clothes and wearing lipstick didn’t seem to me unrealistic. And ... here comes the SPOILER so stop here if you don’t want to know more about the plot... When Port dies, Kit’s own “sheltering sky” collapses and she is confronted with herself pure and unmitigated. Again here I’d be inclined to read this as an existential story if it weren’t for what Kit turns out to be. I found it too much to take that after Port’s death she waves down a caravan to save her and goes on to enjoy being raped by two men, soon becoming a contented sex slave to one of them. Coming to her senses briefly, she escapes that fate too, only to screw the next available guy. I don’t like the message here – woman as neurotic, male-defined nymphomaniac. I disliked the double standard throughout the book, e.g. after Port stumbles home from sleeping with a prostitute he’s outraged when he suspects Kit slept with Tunner. I could rave on and on about this, but suffice it to say at this point, as a woman I was offended.
...more

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Jan 26, 2008 trivialchemy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 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 effect on my li 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. ...more

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Jun 14, 2007 Jessica added it · review of another edition

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 Sheltering Sk ...more

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Oct 17, 2017 Kinga rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Jane Bowles, Paul Bowles’ wife, used to call him (among other things) “Gloompot”. I wonder how she got that; he seemed like such a cheerful guy.

“The Sheltering Sky” is a story of two (sometimes three) American drifters, who consider themselves “travellers” (rather than primitive tourists, you know), in search of something in North Africa – themselves? The meaning of it all? But end up, of course, losing themselves completely for they didn’t realise they are just a sum of social conventions, bel Jane Bowles, Paul Bowles’ wife, used to call him (among other things) “Gloompot”. I wonder how she got that; he seemed like such a cheerful guy.

“The Sheltering Sky” is a story of two (sometimes three) American drifters, who consider themselves “travellers” (rather than primitive tourists, you know), in search of something in North Africa – themselves? The meaning of it all? But end up, of course, losing themselves completely for they didn’t realise they are just a sum of social conventions, beliefs and rituals. And once the sun dries it up, all of it flakes away and “the sheltering sky” cannot shelter them from the emptiness inside them.

The main couple, Port and Kit, in their sexless but not entirely loveless marriage, resemble somewhat Paul and Jane’s unorthodox marriage (they only tried sex for about 1.5 year, after which she went on to sleep with women, he mostly with men, but they remained devoted to each other). And of course, Paul Bowles knows Sahara because he lived in its vicinity most of his life and infected his characters with the yearning for the desert. Personally, the endless sandy dunes never held much appeal to me but reading this beautifully written book almost convinced me that there was some value in the solitude of Sahara.

Like the characters in the meta-story ‘Tea in Sahara’, told to Port by a prostitute, Kit and Port keep looking for some illusive thing, that unspecified perfection that might be behind the next dune. What really propels Port forward is the fact he finds himself in constant psychological discomfort in every single place he is, so he tries to outrun himself. Kit, on the other hand, tags along hunted (and haunted) by bad omens she sees everywhere (you can tell the old girl is about to lose it).

As I mentioned, the writing is generally beautiful, and the characterization is also wonderful, but that doesn’t mean Bowles isn’t occasionally prone to bombastic, existentialist phrases such as “humanity is everyone but yourself” or something in that vein – I haven’t noted the exact quote. However, I do have a soft spot for such borderline pretentious existentialism. And Bowles is good at pacing. He was a composer first and the pacing of this book reminds me of a classical piece that start lazily and gently, gets a little intense in the middle and ends with chaotic cacophony.

I liked it much better than any Hemingway I’ve read but I appreciate it might not be for everyone. If the book isn’t for everyone, the moral of it is: get your travel vaccinations, kids. It might be that the entire cohesion of your being hinges on that.
...more

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Apr 01, 2008 Chip rated it it was amazing

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 Come Down), bu ...more

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May 24, 2008 Annet rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: have-to-read-again, dark, classics

Every once in a while you come across a book which is beyond 5 stars. For me it hasn't happened that much. But this is one of them for me. the last one I rated this way was The Road by Cormac McCarthy. This book is mysterious, intriguing, dark, dangerous, exceptional , loving.... and I have to read it again soon to fully take in all of this beautiful story. It made a deep impression.

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Sep 27, 2014 Mariel rated it liked it

Recommends it for: the sky here's very strange

Recommended to Mariel by: tea in the sahara

The desert- its very silence was like a tacit admission of the half-conscious presence it harbored.

The dog's dead eye twitches like nails and hair curling on a grave. Ancient symbols of trickster rabbits depict that stolen cereal tastes better. I have a long stick to prod the poor doggy for some answers. He's the only creature in sight with a memory of life. Wrestling with the strange inhabitants sound closer to where you could go.

My sister told me that I was unfair complaining that some books The desert- its very silence was like a tacit admission of the half-conscious presence it harbored.

The dog's dead eye twitches like nails and hair curling on a grave. Ancient symbols of trickster rabbits depict that stolen cereal tastes better. I have a long stick to prod the poor doggy for some answers. He's the only creature in sight with a memory of life. Wrestling with the strange inhabitants sound closer to where you could go.

My sister told me that I was unfair complaining that some books shrink me to the couch and talk the walk. I think she said something like I knew in the first place what I knew from books. I know that I could make my world bigger by going between the lives in stories and discovering their rhymes in my own. My recognition of suspicions and patterns had to have walked the Bambi in pages. Sometimes taken out back and put out of their misery. I don't think she's wrong, exactly. So I've been thinking about this in the back of my mind as a bone. Paul Bowles could out-walk the run of death drums of too much psych weight by the background noise. The music that lives this. The people could try and hold your body in front of theirs to ward off the meaningless. I would sit there and pray to something I can't make for myself out of myself alone to please put down the sticks to poke me with. Please kick your infinitesimal sands somewhere else. I know his roosters crowing in some far away dream. Everything but the sun and all of the hungry faces that flew too close to the nothing clean of too light. The sense of self that fades away in presence of lives continuing without you. The unfairness of it. But I don't want to kill it to stick it under a glass, you know? To run away from a pattern of self to sit back and preserve in jelly these grand ideas about them and us. The poor Saharans, the hunger. The savagery of stomping the wings into the dirt heat denied in pressing the person next to you into absolving you. Big questions in the sky, is any of it fair? I know and could talk myself into the writerly decisions. It's just Port and Kit, true to them and their man made walls. It makes sense that Kit philosophical backseats her destiny with them between her legs because Bowles told me all along that she did this. He led me to where there was no door to Port's being. But I don't want to talk myself into believing it. Bowles has done more than this. I freaking loved The Spider's House. He could have made them the carcass buzzing with flies more than the vampiric let me in voice. I think these days I would do anything to avoid that. I know that when Port has to ravel in his reveling solitudes. I can hear the silence and there are voices that speak to me. I don't want to give the answers. Melody and then the lyrics like in 101 Dalmatians. I don't know, I know Paul Bowles can be the desert more than the buzzing of the already dead. I don't know. I feel I need to look at something bigger than let Port and Kit shut up.

Someone once had said to her that the sky hides the night behind it, shelters the person beneath from the horror that lies above. ...more

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Nov 20, 2018 Raul Bimenyimana rated it it was ok

When books come recommended to us by people whose taste we highly respect, even before we read the very first word, they already take a life of their own molded by our expectations. At times, we're lucky and the book does meet and even surpasses what we expected from it, and at times such as now, it is a disappointment.

This story follows three American travellers trotting around North Africa at a period after the Second World War. This book was written (and is also set) before decolonization beg When books come recommended to us by people whose taste we highly respect, even before we read the very first word, they already take a life of their own molded by our expectations. At times, we're lucky and the book does meet and even surpasses what we expected from it, and at times such as now, it is a disappointment.

This story follows three American travellers trotting around North Africa at a period after the Second World War. This book was written (and is also set) before decolonization began and before the Civil Rights Movement in the United States began getting attention, so perhaps it comes as no surprise that some of the characters are deeply anti-semitic and racist, especially the character Mrs. Lyle. Arabs are treated with suspicion and condescending, Jews with contempt and Negroes with slur words. Interesting also is what Africa seems to represent in the story:

"Outside in the dust was the disorder of Africa, but for the first time without any visible sign of European influence, so that the scene had a purity which had been lacking in the other towns, an unexpected quality of being complete which dissipated the feeling of chaos."

Of course a trope of the colonial period and the literature written by Western writers at the time (and in some incidents even to this date), is African disorder, a thing inexpressible, dangerous but alluring, which in this case is required to rid the protagonists of the moral crises they are facing and which in turn leads to destruction.

That aside, I think this book failed in its attempt at analysis into human nature and moral stagnation of post Second World War American expatriates; Maugham's The Razor's Edge and Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, I believe expressed this better. What I think was aimed to be philosophical sounded trite and unconvincing. Bowles however, writes of North African terrain and skies with incredible colourful description, and that I felt, was among the few good things about the book.

I expected something illuminatory given the praise I had heard for the book but was left feeling as though I had missed something, and perhaps I have, although I do not think so. ...more

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Jul 13, 2007 David rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

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, perhaps not ...more

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Nov 26, 2015 Ken rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: finished-in-2015

When you remember reading a book long ago and you remember liking it, trust your instincts. Read it again. I did and, in the case of The Sheltering Sky, didn't regret a thing. I loved the exotic, North African setting. And the always slightly off-balancing love triangle of Port, Kit, and Tunner (what weirdly wonderful names).

Some stop-me sentences, too. I love stop-me sentences. I never run them. Not even a roll-through. In fact, if no one's behind me, I often back up and fail to run them again ...more

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Dec 15, 2013 Mary rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, 2014

“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive ...more

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Aug 23, 2008 Jennifer (aka EM) rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Diehard romantics and existential atheists

Shelves: for-the-desert-island, hidden-gems

Forgot how much I loved this book. Love it. The richness of the character portraits, relationships, and existential themes; as well as the startling detail of the images are highlighted even more by knowing the ending.

Back with more ... heading into Part II.

12/28/08: A piece of writing by Donald Powell [link now dead-sorry!:] caused me to think about this book, and my very different response to it from when I first read it in my early 20s to 20 years later, when I am--ahem--not in my early 20s.

B ...more

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Jan 23, 2015 Clif Hostetler rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: novel

This 1949 novel is considered by the literati as classic literature that reflects "post-colonial alienation and existential despair." (Quote is from Wikipedia.)

Apparently I don't like "existential despair" because I didn't enjoy reading this book. I will grant that the writing is good. It occurred to me while listening to the audio edition that many portions of the narrative could be presented as free verse at a modern day poetry slam and it could be passed off as good poetry.

But the story its This 1949 novel is considered by the literati as classic literature that reflects "post-colonial alienation and existential despair." (Quote is from Wikipedia.)

Apparently I don't like "existential despair" because I didn't enjoy reading this book. I will grant that the writing is good. It occurred to me while listening to the audio edition that many portions of the narrative could be presented as free verse at a modern day poetry slam and it could be passed off as good poetry.

But the story itself is about some Americans travelers--they don't think of themselves as tourists--wandering across the Sahara Desert. I found these characters not only unlikeable but also prone to repeatedly and inexplicably make unwise travel decisions. The adventure of the three main characters begins in Morocco and then moves into French Algeria. (view spoiler)

Many readers at the time this book was published apparently considered the deserts of French colonial North Africa to be a romantic setting for such a story. Subsequent history of that area in particular and the Moslem world in general has erased any romantic associations in my mind.

Why is it that exquisite writing elaborating a depressed outlook on life by bored characters is considered literature that provides an insight into post-war 20th Century life? I must not be depressed enough to appreciate this literature.

The following are some excerpts from a review written by Tennessee Williams and published in the New York Times in December 1949.

... "The Sheltering Sky" alone of the books that I have recently read by American authors appears to bear the spiritual imprint of recent history in the western world. Here the imprint is not visible upon the surface of the novel. It exists far more significantly in a certain philosophical aura that envelopes it.

There is a curiously double level to this novel. The surface is enthralling as narrative. It is impressive as writing. But above that surface is the aura that I spoke of, intangible and powerful, bringing to mind one of those clouds that you have seen in summer, close to the horizon and dark in color and now and then silently pulsing with interior flashes of fire. And that is the surface of the novel that has filled me with such excitement.
.....
In this external aspect the novel is, therefore, an account of startling adventure. In its interior aspect, "The Sheltering Sky" is an allegory of the spiritual adventure of the fully conscious person into modern experience. This is not an enticing way to describe it. It is a way that might suggest the very opposite kind of a novel from the one that Paul Bowles has written. Actually this superior motive does not intrude in explicit form upon the story, certainly not in any form that will need to distract you from the great pleasure of being told a first-rate story of adventure by a really first-rate writer.

I suspect that a good many people will read this book and be enthralled by it without once suspecting that it contains a mirror of what is most terrifying and cryptic within the Sahara of moral nihilism, into which the race of man now seems to be wandering blindly.

For myself I can say that I was not enthralled by the story. And since reading Tennessee Williams' explanation of its deeper meaning, I guess I can also say that the "mirror of what is most terrifying and cryptic within the Sahara of moral nihilism" is not to my liking either.
...more

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May 31, 2011 Brian rated it really liked it

I read this early in my 20s - more than a decade before traveling beyond US soil and 15 years before witnessing the siren call of an African desert. Bowles' fiction is hypnotic, and his strongly written characters seem to have relevance to a reader at any stage in life. But I want to put that theory to the test, so I'm reminding myself now: re-read this book.

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Oct 19, 2017 Anna rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

L'Être et le Sahara

This novel is a portrayal of the African cultural shock experienced by Western visitors, painted in existentialist colors. The trip taken by Port and Kit Moresby in their flight from post-WWII chaos and in hope of healing their twelve years of marriage is Bowles’s stage for the classic-flavored existentialist drama. In one of the initial, almost Kafkaesque scenes where Port immerses himself in the foreign night following a young woman who sells her body and time for money, the L'Être et le Sahara

This novel is a portrayal of the African cultural shock experienced by Western visitors, painted in existentialist colors. The trip taken by Port and Kit Moresby in their flight from post-WWII chaos and in hope of healing their twelve years of marriage is Bowles’s stage for the classic-flavored existentialist drama. In one of the initial, almost Kafkaesque scenes where Port immerses himself in the foreign night following a young woman who sells her body and time for money, the story she weaves for him, as if taken from the Arabian nights, prophetically forecasts Port’s path.

The married lead characters are complete opposites of each other. The man drifts with the current of his quest for himself, barely connecting to the world. His wife, quite to the contrary, is completely engaged with the perceptible world: she pathologically confers magical powers to objects and sees esoteric associations as she searches for her own meaning, but also for release from the frightening meaning she believes she’s seeing. Though the characters are modern and progressist thinkers, especially Kit, Bowles creates a traditional male-female typology in them. Port’s relationship with the world is horizontal as he attempts to conquer its breadth, while Kit’s is vertical and she is inclined to stay at one place and explore its depths. They examine themselves and each other’s selves in spousal chats peppered with pestering that are quite like a domestic version of Plato’s Academy. We know nothing of the first decade of their marriage, as indeed travelers have no history.

In Port's quest for the authentic experience of existence, his external travels are always rotations of his internal kaleidoscope, as well, a sort of an inner travel. He always wants to be en route, where, he claims, he can think objectively. But this alleged objective thought triggered by travel does not help Port find himself. His peregrinations are not truly a search of identity, but rather a flight (when he loses his passport, he finds a strange satisfaction in losing the possibility of being identified). He expects his wife to be the unchanged Archimedean point from which he can move the world.

The dynamics of their relationship leads to the same question as the unparalleled representation of inner travel, Tarkovsky’s Stalker: can someone be happy at the expense of another’s unhappiness, particularly if this other is a significant other? While the stalker-guided trip in the absurd environment takes place in the presence of mystery and provides an opportunity for the emergence of faith, any mystery for the Moresby travelers ends in the exotic, whose spectacular appearances make any self-confronting introspection and authentic connection with the other impossible.

Despite Kit’s extraordinary intelligence and intellectual sensitivity, her life is determined by her husband and his travel plans. Self-discovery for Kit starts only after the death of her husband. As she philosophizes about herself, the typical delicate female character so well represented in old movies becomes a truly Cartesian thinker. The next stations of her journey feel like a Pasolini-directed case study of the Stockholm syndrome. From her slavery, which has been partially voluntary and partially under coercion, she awakens when she returns to the woman we knew her to be early in the story: the one who sees magical signs and connections. Eventually this gives her strength to seek escape from her horrible vulnerability. And though she obviously shows all the signs of post-traumatic stress, contrary to Port's, her personality becomes more mature.

Another lead character of Bowles’s novel is the Sahara. The desert appears as an essence of all matter, such as water for Thales and air for Anaximenes. Merging into its texture, which is sensorially poor but existentially rich, Port reaches a nadir of emptiness: he finds there is no deeper dimension he could discover. It is in the Sahara that they experience the darkest point of their path of self-discovery: there’s nothing above them, but the sheltering sky that protects them from the darkness above. Every new settlement they visit is a new stage on this path, but also marks the growing distance between them.

Dialogues have no role in shaping the plot, they merely illustrate what we have already discovered from the narration. In every turning point, the selectively omniscient narrator shifts the focus. The crucial events experienced by the characters are not detailed. We only learn of the aftermath of such moments, from other characters, which suggests that existence, in its bareness, is a mysterious and utterly personal experience. ...more

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Jan 12, 2010 Chrissie rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, morocco, text-checked, philo-psychol, audible, 2013-read, returned

What exactly is the author trying to say with this book? Is he selling us existentialism through this novel? Perhaps. What is he saying about the central couple’s relationship, both with each and with their friends? This too is unclear. The two main protagonists are trying to reach out to each other, but do they succeed? This circles back to the author’s philosophical message. Perhaps it is enough that the book draws our attention to these questions. The answers are not clear.

What does the autho What exactly is the author trying to say with this book? Is he selling us existentialism through this novel? Perhaps. What is he saying about the central couple’s relationship, both with each and with their friends? This too is unclear. The two main protagonists are trying to reach out to each other, but do they succeed? This circles back to the author’s philosophical message. Perhaps it is enough that the book draws our attention to these questions. The answers are not clear.

What does the author want to say with the title? This too is unclear, but worth discussion.

The first half of the book is very different from the second half. I do not feel the two hold together. The first half focuses on philosophy. The first half has many parallels with Camus’ “The Stranger”. Both are set in Africa, one in Morocco and the other in Algeria. There is a streetcar in both. In neither is it the individuals that control their lives, but rather the other way around. Life just happens and you must submit. The second half has a completely different style of writing. You switch from philosophical analysis to a plot oriented, adventure story reminiscent of “One Thousand and One Nights”. Depending on your preferences you will like one or the other…..but not both.

The audiobook narration by Jennifer Connelly is very well done. She distinguishes between English and American characters. They do make you smile…. Maybe this is because I now live in Europe? French, English and Arabic languages are used; this is done adroitly. The languages are not translated. Although I don’t see this as a problem, I was happy that I easily understood the French. The slang chosen felt genuine; that is exactly how people would express themselves.

A central theme of the book is the difference between travelers and tourists. In fact this is why I chose the book, having myself lived in different countries. The main protagonists see themselves as travelers, but I felt they acted often as tourists. Rather than being curious about a new environment and culture they were d-i-s-g-u-s-t-e-d and apathetic. They couldn’t possibly have thought that the difficulties that arose and the filth they saw were anything but to be expected! They seemed to be looking for a clean problem free journey. This seems terribly illogical. Part of this IS explained by the difference between the man and the women, and it is interesting to consider which one of them really was the “traveler”.

There are loose ends in this novel, characters thrown in that one cannot fully understand. What happens to them is left completely unresolved. Nope this was not well done.

There is quite a bit that can be discussed in this book, but I can only give it two stars. It was not terrible, but just OK.
...more

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Aug 09, 2015 Elyse Walters rated it it was amazing

This is another book which sat unread on my shelf getting dusty. I might have read it sooner had I known the storytelling would include some juicy cat-fighting -nasty conniving covert back stabbing self destructing characters!!
I loved the book.....while at the same time had an aversion to the characters.

I laughed at symbolic sentences such as....."The dining room was unfriendly and formal to a degree which is acceptable only when the service is impeccable; this was not the case here. I'd break This is another book which sat unread on my shelf getting dusty. I might have read it sooner had I known the storytelling would include some juicy cat-fighting -nasty conniving covert back stabbing self destructing characters!!
I loved the book.....while at the same time had an aversion to the characters.

I laughed at symbolic sentences such as....."The dining room was unfriendly and formal to a degree which is acceptable only when the service is impeccable; this was not the case here. I'd break to laugh...."It WAS OUR RICH AMERICANS-- the central characters - who were UNFRIENDLY"...... the dining room itself was perfectly fine!!!

Oh this book is good - juicy good! I call "East of Eden" juicy good too...which is one of my favorite books! So-- what I'm saying is--I LIKED THIS BOOK ....as disturbing as it is - as dark as it is - as depressing as it - even the Sahara itself is dreary and dismal.

The introduction by Tobias Wolff in the 65th anniversary paperback is excellent. It gave me a great framework about the illusion of freewill and how it relates to the novel that Paul Bowles wrote.
I never expected there was going to be SO MUCH DRAMA!!!

I haven't been to North Africa -- but I have been to India. Back in the early 70's I traveled for much the same reasons these Americans did in this book - to get away from AMERICA-- and all that it stood for. I realized later - I was not only leaving the country to 'see the world' ....( which I did), I was running from myself. Yet -- in time, I learned the big lesson... there is no place to run. There is no sacred place 'magical' place on this planet that can have you escape yourself.

This is a FANTASTIC book - complex-much to contemplate and examine. It's heartbreaking & disturbing ...passionate and loving...often chaotic and crazy.
However... as great as it was, and I related to it from my own travel experiences in the early 70s, I'm guessing that if Paul Bowles wrote this book today, in 2017...a few things 'would' be different.

Gorgeous writing!!! ...more

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Dec 08, 2017 Alex rated it liked it

Shelves: 2017, dick-lit

I'm looking for a book about white people who drink too much, do you have anything like that? Oh right this way sir, right here in the front we have our White People Who Drink Too Much shelf. Wow there's a whole shelf, huh. Yes it turns out that nearly every single book ever written is about white people who drink too much. Gosh! Do they sometimes also have sex with each other in combinations that they later regret? Always, sir. Always. Oh good, I've been wondering how white people who drink too I'm looking for a book about white people who drink too much, do you have anything like that? Oh right this way sir, right here in the front we have our White People Who Drink Too Much shelf. Wow there's a whole shelf, huh. Yes it turns out that nearly every single book ever written is about white people who drink too much. Gosh! Do they sometimes also have sex with each other in combinations that they later regret? Always, sir. Always. Oh good, I've been wondering how white people who drink too much might feel about having ill-advised sex with each other.

Wait a minute though, because this one seems like it's taking rather a big swerve into existential horror here, isn't it? It's not that I didn't know people would die, I understand that they often do in these books, but I didn't quite expect it to be so...drawn out. It's all feeling a bit real here, which is, if we're being honest, unseemly.

And then here at the end, well...well, I'm not sure what this is at all. It would seem to an untrained eye that (view spoiler) Now, it can't possibly by this...baldly nasty, can it? Oh yes, sir, it can indeed, these men often are.

Look: Book One is boring, Book Two is staggeringly brilliant, Book Three is extremely unpleasant business, so...what is that, three stars? Three stars and maybe I need another drink.

Appendix: a story about Paul Bowles
Pointed out by my wonderful friend S., here's a story about going all the way to Morocco to meet Paul Bowles. I've linked you to the meeting part in case you don't have 20 minutes, but if you do have 20 minutes go ahead and listen to the whole thing, because it's not really about meeting Paul Bowles anyway, it's about being Edgar Oliver, who is one of those people who's decided to be exactly who he is all the time, which is something you can really only do if who you are is so weird that camouflage is difficult or impossible anyway. Like, I'm a little weird? But I can basically pass for normal, and so of course I do because it is so much easier to do literally everything when people aren't distracted by one's weirdness.

When someone is weird you have to consider everything. What kind of weird is this person going to be, and how am I going to feel about it? When someone is weird all bets are off. Will he grope me in a stairwell. Will he offer me peyote and I'll suddenly have to try to remember whether I'm in favor of peyote or not. If it turns out they're just having a conversation about when Game of Thrones is coming back, you may find that it's hard to concentrate because you're so busy trying to decide whether they're wonderfully weird or creepily weird and why are they like whatever they're like. It is very difficult, and I've tried being weird a few times (or just been so high that it's the same thing) and you can tell people are doing all this.

For the rest of us, those of us who can pass, we generally do, because it's much easier to get around when everyone has a basic expectation of how you might act in a given situation. You are likely to be sortof on time, and not start extremely intense conversations in coffee shops, and wear clothes, and not be high at surprising times, and be able to pay your share of the bill. These are comforting things to know.

Anyway so the only people who really let their freak flags fly are the ones whose freak flags are too big to furl, and here we are with Edgar Oliver, somewhat of a NYC theater legend, who the minute he speaks and/or moves you're like oh, we have an original on our hands, so the 20 minutes of this story is really about just sort basking in Edgar Oliver being exactly who he is, which, for those of us who usually pass, is moving. What a difficult and special life he must lead. ...more

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May 17, 2008 Amy rated it really liked it · review of another edition

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 deterioration of a marria ...more

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Oct 29, 2008 Will Byrnes rated it liked it

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

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May 22, 2018 Radiantflux rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, places-and-travel

52nd book for 2018.

A book about a rich intellectually pretentious American couple, who travel shortly after the Second World War to North Africa to immerse themselves in the local colour, and who within a couple of weeks are (some combination of) robbed, gang raped, driven insane, and/or dead from typhoid dysentery.

Nice writing, but not much in the way of plot, misogynistic, and the ending seemed tacked on. Some nice descriptions of sand and dust.

3-stars.

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Sep 06, 2016 Chris_P rated it liked it

Shelves: classics-and-modern-classics

The Sheltering Sky with the somewhat unattractive greek title Τσάι στη Σαχάρα, has left me with mixed feelings. The word that kept flashing in my mind throughout the book is detachment. The unlikable main characters are detached from one another and so is the reader from them. Their personalities, just like their most personal and hidden thoughts, are laid out in front of the reader like shadowplay watched from afar, thus never close enough to actually make connection. Of course, it's deliberate ...more

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Feb 05, 2011 Szplug rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shivering in the antarctic morality of The Delicate Prey , I'm continually needled by the desire to reread TSS and discover if I would still care as little for it today as I did when I read it more than a dozen years ago. I came to it back then with a fair amount of anticipation, having read several raving reviews, especially from posters I had enjoyed on that usenet staple rec.arts.books; and the disappointment that Bowles engendered in me was crushing. Too distant a narrative; Yank characters ...more

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Jan 15, 2019 Mook Woramon rated it liked it · review of another edition

อานหนังสือดีๆไมเคยอินกะเคาเลยยย สงสารตัวเองเหลือเกิน

คูรักทีชีวิตคูกำลังจะพังทลาย เดินทางไปหาความตืนเตนและความหมายของชีวิตในแอฟริกา เดิมกมีความปวยใจกันอยูเปนทุนเดิม แตไปเจอชะตากรรมหดหู รันทดในแอฟริกาอีก ชีวิตพังทลายกันไปหมด แหลกสลายไมอาจเปนอยางเดิม สงสัยแควาถายอนเวลาได เคาจะเลือกไปหาความหมายในแอฟริกาเหมือนเดิมมัยนะ รึจริงๆแลวจิตใจของพวกเคากบิดเบียวจนไมอาจเยียวยาไดอยูแลวกันแน

จริงๆมักไมคอยอินกับแนวเรืองการเดินทางเพือคนหาความหมายอะไรบางอยาง เพราะชีวิตจริงไมเคยรูสึกแบบนัน 5555 ...more

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Feb 08, 2014 Ned rated it really liked it

The title of this book is alluded to by both protagonists, and it seems to be spiritual and existential terror of what lies outside of the earth's atmospheric canopy. The shelter guards against the fear of nothingness, no God or protector against the festering human condition (i.e. the western culture that has ruined the earth and psyche for which Port seeks escape). The unrelenting sun of the Sahara is recurrent, and its penetrating eye is considered malevolent. Port seeks that oblivion, to kno The title of this book is alluded to by both protagonists, and it seems to be spiritual and existential terror of what lies outside of the earth's atmospheric canopy. The shelter guards against the fear of nothingness, no God or protector against the festering human condition (i.e. the western culture that has ruined the earth and psyche for which Port seeks escape). The unrelenting sun of the Sahara is recurrent, and its penetrating eye is considered malevolent. Port seeks that oblivion, to know it at all costs, an unknown but antidote against the over-intellectualized culture of his place in time.

This was a book unlike anything I've ever read, and stirred a lot of thoughts. The author is very present, as I've learned by reading about him, in all the characters. To start, the time frame is unique to the post WW2 mindset, where the worldwide ravages are a part of the landscape, even in northern Africa (I tend to forget here was a serious war there too, with all the geopolitical consequences). This stands in opposition to what Brokaw called the "great generation" who built America into what it is today, fueled by the capitalist opportunities of the war. Bowles is part of that angst-ridden generation who can't come to terms with the horrors of mankind's nature, as revealed by the war. He's closer (geographically and psychically) to Camus, that other French novelist who wrote about Africa and moral ambiguity in The Stranger (the only one of his I've read, back in the 80's). Bowles also seems affiliated with the beat generation, having hung with Burroughs in Algiers and Ginsberg. Actually it made me wonder if the dream sequences of Kit and Port were fueled by writing under the influence of cannabis. Bowles seems authentic as a renaissance man of old, being well known for his musical writing and performances as well as multi-linguistic, multi-cultural, translator extraordinaire and literary novelist, essayist and poet. They don't make many like that any more. I'm wondering what you all think about watching the movie once reading the book? That can sometimes ruin it for me. But, enough about the author and the movie, this was a tremendous book with a fascination all its own..... ...more

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Jul 18, 2008 Sara Batkie added it

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

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Jul 23, 2011 AC rated it it was amazing

Shelves: novels-english

Having seen the movie, which of course was uneven, I hesitated about reading this book - but needed something I could beat up at the beach. Then there were quite a few quite negative reviews it's gotten from GR friends (that I respect).

Well..., invho, this book is nearly flawless and is a work of near genius. The overall conception, the structure and composition, the depth of language, intelligence... AND the depth of feeling.... Character and plot..., nearly flawless. I would have asked him to ...more

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May 30, 2016 Mojo_Mama rated it really liked it

Shelves: loved

Having lived in Egypt for most of my 20's, I related to this in a visceral way. There are parts of North Africa and the Middle East that are beautifully magical. There are other parts that are hell on earth. It's sometimes just the luck of the draw which experience you might encounter there.

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Jul 15, 2013 Genia Lukin rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: other

Maybe I just don't enjoy post-colonial existential angst. I don't know. perhaps this sort of thing doesn't age as well as other subjects, but I can say I didn't enjoy The Stranger very much, and i found this book to be ultimately extremely boring.

I find it hard even to put down precisely which parts had bored me more than others, but there was a sense of complete offhandedness in the way the book was written that I found basically put me to sleep while reading. Port and Kit were glorified touris ...more

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Oct 07, 2013 Max rated it liked it

Shelves: postmodern

The Sheltering Sky is an unnerving spiraling descent into oblivion. Bowles uses evocative descriptions of a journey deep into the Sahara to mirror a journey of disintegration of the human spirit. The narrative is packed with disquieting wistful insights. For example, “The wind blew, the sand would settle, and in some as yet unforeseen manner time would bring about a change which would only be terrifying, since it could not be a continuation of the present.”

Like the landscape, the characters are ...more

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May 14, 2011 Magdelanye rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorite, spiritual-adventure

The first time I read this book I was in my 20's, and though it made a deep impression on me, and I loved it passionately, that was so long ago that I was amazed and somewhat dismayed to find that I remembered nothing of the detail. Only towards the end, when I was not surprised by the bizarre events that unfolded, did I have any sense even of deju vu. It was as if I was reading it for the first time.
Once again I was swept up in the lyrical writing and scope of the story.
Bowles is a brilliant s ...more

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Sep 10, 2015 Mel rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2016, some-of-my-best-reads, rugged-individuals

I didn't expect to enjoy this book as much as I did. It was mentioned in Patti Smith's M Train that I had just read as one of her many literary obsessions. I can see why she enjoyed it. The language, which is at times realistic and other times dreamy, is similar to some of the language she uses in her story telling.

Bowles really takes you on a journey through North Africa, and the language he uses to do it is really wonderful. I also felt some of the subject matter and character's reactions are ...more

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Port Moresby's just desert	5	26	Mar 08, 2016 12:03PM
my take	2	23	Feb 01, 2016 06:31AM
Why couldn't I put this book down?	12	67	Dec 01, 2015 07:31AM
Why Bowles is such a master of suspense	11	32	Jun 27, 2014 02:16PM

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About Paul Bowles

Paul Bowles

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Paul Bowles grew up in New York, and attended college at the University of Virginia before traveling to Paris, where became a part of Gertrude Stein's literary and artistic circle. Following her advice, he took his first trip to Tangiers in 1931 with his friend, composer Aaron Copeland.

In 1938 he married author and playwright Jane Auer (see: Jane Bowles). He moved to Tangiers permanently in 1947, ...more

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“How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.” — 115 likes

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